March Meeting Recap

Writing for the Web: Tried and True, or Something New?

Writing for the web has become a fundamental task in today's world of technical communication. At our March 19^th meeting, STC Associate Fellow Pam Ecker spoke on the latest trends and standard principles in writing for the web. Pam is director of the Technical and Professional Writing program, and chair of the Multimedia Design department at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. Pam teaches courses in informational and persuasive writing for print, Web, broadcast and other media, as well as technical editing and usability assessment.

The publishing industry is in turmoil. Pam quoted from authorities, including Thad McIlroy, Nader Dareshori and Lee Wilson, on the current state of publishing. The picture they paint is confusing. More written material is being produced, but profits from traditional print publications are down. Digital publishing and the internet are making old business models obsolete. The future of publishing lies in disseminating ideas, rather than printing.

What does this mean for technical communicators? Industry experts project continued high demand for workers in technical communications and related fields. U.S. News & World Report’s Best Careers for a Changing Job Landscape (2008) lists curriculum/training specialist, editor, ghostwriter, librarian, systems analyst and usability/user experience specialist as high-potential careers for the present and near future.

However, writing for digital media, requires a different approach than writing for printed media. Readers of digital media use a “satisficing” strategy, scanning pages quickly for cues to the content they seek. Herbert Simon coined the term “satisfice”—a combination of the words “satisfy” and “suffice”—to describe solutions that are not perfect, but good enough. These are frequently the solutions that we use in the real world.

Usability experts Steve Krug, Lance Loveday, Sandra Niehaus, Jakob Nielsen and Janice Redish offer tips on how to write for digital media. First, use fewer words; readers typically do not linger over a web page as they would over a novel or poem. Tone is critical, use a more conversational tone than you would in print. Provide structure to guide the reader; digital media do not have the assumed (linear) structure of print media. Use design to reinforce information and enhance the user experience. Finally, think about how readers will use technology (e.g. search engines, bots, PDAs, cell phones) to access the information.

Change is inevitable and technical communication will continue to evolve. In our lifetimes we (well some of us, anyway) have seen the migration from typewriters to word processors to desktop publishers. The growth of the Internet brought us e-mail, web sites, blogs and wikis. While technology changes, the basic principals of technical communication remain the same. Content is king. The media and the technical communicator are only the means to deliver content to the user. To that end, technical communicators must know their audience. In the end, we are still delivering factual information to human beings.

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