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Home > Press > About our book, Hot Text, Web Writing that Works |
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Overview of our book, Hot Text! Web Writing that Works
New Riders, 512 pp, US$40 Writing for
the Web transforms our old ideas of audience, structure, and
style. When we immerse ourselves in the Internet, we see concepts
that we have inherited from years of writing on paper begin to dissolve. On the Web, for instance, the audience is no
longer just a passive recipient of documents that we publish. Instead, in
many cases, the audience starts the communication, asking pointed
questions, lodging lengthy complaints, bugging us for a response. We can no longer think of ourselves as “authors.”
We are instead participants in a conversation, swapping ideas across the
Net, exchanging e-mail, Web pages, discussion postings with these other
folks, many of whom have better ideas, more experience, and deeper wisdom
than we do. What a comedown! And how much more fun! Our relationship
becomes more sociable. In a blitz of flames, rants, and instant messages,
this new, active audience suggests topics to discuss, problems to
resolve, entertainment they would like to experience. They are guiding
the conversation. And in response, we can no longer simply dish out
entire documents, with the answers buried in there somewhere. Sometimes
the answer to a particular question lies in one paragraph-and that is all
the person wants to read. So we are beginning to abandon whole documents,
turning our attention to the components that make up those documents-the
informative objects within. Responding to the demand for pinpoint information
while producing content in an object-oriented environment, we must write
carefully following a standard organization, so that the software can skim
right to the relevant objects, displaying them, and manipulating them at
the command of the user. We are learning to think structurally, as
we write. And the way that our text appears on the computer
screen constrains the way people perceive, use, interpret, understand, and
recall whatever we write. Because the screen resolution is so much worse
than that of a printed page, our Web text is harder to read, more
difficult to grasp as a whole, more blurry in memory. Visitors to our
sites resist reading to the last moment, using text to navigate,
postponing actual reading as long as possible, and when they do settle
down to read, they often ask for short chunks of prose-abrupt talk.
To move our ideas through this medium, adapting to
the situation in which our text will appear, we adopt a tighter, tougher,
and smarter tone. Web style grows naturally out of the electronic
medium we use for this extended conversation. |
About our book Table of Contents (PDF, 1 minute at 56k)
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