Writing Tips
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
David Warlick at 2¢ Worth lays out some simple points on writing to communicate. These tips apply particularly well to writing for an online audience where page width can range from around 8 inches to at least twice that, making for extremely long lines, and where typical visual landmarks/cues, like left and right pages, page edges, and page numbering, are absent.
The four key ideas he mentions are:
- Write in short paragraphs, separate by lots of white space
- Any list of items that accedes two, should be bulleted
- Headings and subheadings should hang out over the paragraphs that follow
- If an idea can be effectively conveyed with an image, then it should be conveyed with an image
These are relatively straight-forward ideas, but they don’t follow the traditional form of essays and many other print mediums. Writing for online publication is a different medium and brings with it different nuances.
For more detailed descriptions of Warlick’s four points, see his complete posting, Writing to Communicate, at 2¢ Worth
Tags: Language Arts, Writing