Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, October 1, Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill? has a great piece of advice: take the red pen to the extraneous introductory text and cut to the chase.
He then points out that:
“It’s easy to tell Web writers to cut the fluff. It’s harder to actually do it. Each time a new content contributor joins your team, you must drill them incessantly on the special guidelines for writing for the Web. The guidelines seem obvious, but it takes a lot of skill to design good verbiage.”
I like Jakob’s advice. I try and follow it whenever I can.
But he’s missing an important point here (and I’ll lay bets he knows it).
Lots of web writers and editors don’t need to be told to cut the puff, fluff and verbiage. They know how to write for the web because they’ve been reading useit.com for years.
They’ve been trained as copywriters, journalists and subeditors. They’ve been drilled by print editors during their very lean periods after university, college or school when they worked for next-to-nothing to learn their trade.
They can write tight copy. They can kill unnecessary adjectives. They can write short, punchy sentences. They can keep to one idea per paragraph. And they can do it in plain language, with their eyes closed and their hands tied.
What they can’t do is say “no, I won’t publish that” to the VP of marketing, or comms director, or other departmental boss who’s been called in to back up his marcomms people (or other contributors) who’ve been fighting the web team for that pointless “intro” text (and the rest) because, they say, it’s important.
Want to escalate the disagreement even further? It’s easier to just wait till after office hours and have a beer. No one’s going to read the intro text anyway … users know how to scan past it.
