Writing for the web

Scanning is the default, not a failure

A visitor arrives with a question and a limited budget of attention. They sweep the page for the shape of an answer, and only settle into reading once they believe the answer is there.

That is not laziness and it is not something to write against. It is how anybody behaves with unfamiliar material on a screen, and the pages that work are the ones designed for it.

So the job is to make the shape of the answer visible before any of it is read, which is also what lets an answer engine find the part that answers a question. Headings, short paragraphs and a direct opening do that; a wall of even, well-written prose does not.

Front-load every line

Put the important words at the start of headings, sentences and list items, because the start is the part that gets read. A heading beginning with a qualifier buries its own subject.

The same applies to paragraphs. If the first sentence carries the point, a scanner who reads only first sentences still gets the page, which is a remarkable amount of value for a reordering.

Our page on answer-first writing covers the same principle at page level. This is the sentence-level version of it and they reinforce each other.

Short sentences, ordinary words

Long sentences are harder on a screen than on paper, and much harder on a phone where the line is narrow and the reader is frequently distracted. Around eighteen words is a comfortable average.

Ordinary words beat impressive ones every time. A reader who has to decode a term stops scanning, and the decoding costs more attention than the term saved.

Our page on plain language covers the vocabulary side in detail, including why writing simply is harder and more valuable than writing formally.

What makes a page scannable

The list below is what a reader uses to navigate a page without reading it. A page missing most of them can only be read start to finish, which means it mostly is not read at all.

• Real headings that name their subject
• Short paragraphs, three or four lines at most
• The point in the first sentence of each one
• A list where the content is genuinely a list
• Bold used rarely, on things that matter
• Descriptive link wording inside the prose
• Nothing important hidden in a long block

Headings do the navigation

A reader scanning a page is reading its headings and little else until something stops them. Headings that name their subject plainly are therefore the most valuable words on the page.

Clever headings work against this. A section called The elephant in the room tells a scanner nothing, and the reader who would have wanted that section walks past it.

Keep the levels in order as well. Our page on heading structure covers why a skipped level costs you with screen readers and parsers alike.

Write for the phone

Most visitors arrive on a phone, where a paragraph that looks reasonable on a desktop becomes a dense block. What reads as four lines on a wide screen can be twelve on a narrow one.

Check your own pages on a phone rather than in a preview pane. The difference is consistently larger than people expect and it changes which paragraphs need breaking up.

It also changes link placement. A link at the end of a long paragraph on a phone is a long way from the sentence that motivated it, so put links where the subject comes up.

Cut, then cut again

Most web writing improves by a third being removed. The removals are usually the same things: throat-clearing openings, restatements of the heading, and sentences that soften a point rather than making it.

The test is whether deleting a sentence loses anything. If the page reads the same without it, the sentence was costing attention and returning nothing.

Our page on proofreading covers the final pass. Cutting is a separate job from correcting and it produces more improvement per minute than anything else.