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Writing for the Web
by Joe Marren

Joe Marren’s article “Writing for the Web” echoes many other articles of the same subject.  Marren begins with explaining the principles of knowing your audience and knowing the proper display form for online writing.

When writing for your audience, make sure to include these five steps:

• Have informative subheads.
• Use bold type on proper nouns or important points.
• Use bulleted lists.
• Keep paragraphs short (one idea).
• Have pictures or graphics. Remember the broadcast maxim: "See cow, don't say cow."

Marren advises to write to add depth to your story, by using layers, videos and audio and engaging reader interaction.  Here are a few tips:

• Clickable interactive: graphics or other elements that add to the depth of a story.
• Slideshows (with or without audio): photos with cutlines for strong visual stories.
• Surveys: questions and answers on a topic.

From here, Marren gives four important suggestions to consider when writing a web page. 

First, Marren says to “make it tight and bright”.   By writing using active voice, proper use of adjectives and adverbs and subject-verb-object sentences, the online medium will make the story readable.

Make sure to explain the story to the readers, Marren says, but use only the facts.

“Be sure the story is complete and cut out the superfluous text from previous versions,” Marren says.

Banishing gray is the next step according to Marren.  By “the gray”, Marren means the huge blocks of text that make stories hard to read online.  Try making the graphs shorter and finding other display options including charts and tables.  Make the story scannable and splittable.