Writing for people who are not reading

Web writing is a different craft from writing well, and the difference is that nobody is reading. They are scanning, deciding, and reading only the part that answers them.

Front-load everything

The answer comes first, then the explanation. This is the opposite of how most people write, because a build-up feels like good structure and on a web page it means the reader leaves before the point.

Applied to a heading: say what is in the section rather than being clever about it. Applied to a paragraph: the first sentence should be the one that would survive if the rest were deleted. Applied to a page: the thing somebody came for goes above the fold, not after the context.

The patterns that make a page scannable

• Headings that describe their section, so a reader can skip to the part they want and a screen reader can navigate.
• Short paragraphs. Three or four lines on a phone. A long block is skipped on sight regardless of what is in it.
• Lists for things that are actually a list, and prose for things that are an argument. Bulleting an argument destroys it.
• Bold for the two or three phrases that matter, not for emphasis throughout, which emphasises nothing.
• Specific numbers rather than vague quantities, because numbers are what eyes stop on.

Words to remove

Not for style. Because each of them is a place where a specific thing was available and a general one was used instead.

• Solutions, offerings, services, where the actual thing could be named.
• Leverage, utilise, facilitate, where use, or a verb that means something, would do.
• Seamless, robust, cutting-edge, world-class, and every other adjective a competitor could also claim.
• We are passionate about, which tells the reader about you at the moment they are asking about themselves.
• Any sentence beginning with the words in today's fast-moving.

Write the page as answers

1. 01List the questions somebody has on this page, in the order they ask them.
2. 02Make each one a heading, phrased as they would phrase it.
3. 03Answer each in two or three sentences, starting with the answer.
4. 04Then remove the headings that turned out to be the same question twice.

Pages written this way read as useful rather than as marketing, perform better in search because they match what people actually type, and are considerably easier to write than a page that has to be persuasive from a standing start.

Headings and being found

Writing in questions and answers is not only a readability trick. It aligns the page with what people actually type into a search engine, which is increasingly a question rather than two keywords, and it gives both a reader and a machine a clear statement of what each section contains.

Which argues for phrasing headings as the question rather than as a label. How much does it cost works better than pricing, for the reader scanning and for the search that brought them.

What a generated draft always needs

Worth stating plainly, since a good deal of web copy now starts as a model's output and the faults are consistent.

• The restatement removed. Every section opens by saying what it is about to say.
• The specifics put in. Generated prose is general by default, and the general version is the one a competitor could also publish.
• The confident facts checked. Anything that reads as a statistic, a date, a regulation or a quotation needs verifying before it goes out under your name.
• The hedging cut. It is important to note, in today's landscape, and whether you are a small business or a large enterprise all go.
• Something of yours added: what you have seen, what you do differently, what you would warn somebody about. This is the part a model cannot supply and the only part that makes the page worth publishing.

Reading it aloud

The last pass, and the one that catches what the others miss. Read the page out loud at normal speed. Every sentence you stumble over is one a reader will stumble over silently, every clause you run out of breath in is too long, and every phrase that sounds absurd spoken is a phrase that reads as marketing. It takes four minutes on a page and it is more reliable than any readability score.