Writing for the web
The words on the screen: how to write, structure and publish them so they get read.
Reflections on thirty years in tech: as a writer, a designer, a developer and a user.
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Controlled language: one word, one meaning
Aviation built a version of English with nine hundred words, and three of its habits belong on every website
It is the dullest sentence in aviation and it describes something no style guide has ever managed. In 1983 the European aerospace industry went looking for a controlled language and could not find one that fitted; by…
Writing for the web
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PDF: the format that will not bend
When a PDF is the right answer, and the four times it is not
You are on a web page from a municipality, a ministry, an agency. Somewhere in the middle of a sentence there is a link, and behind the link is a file: twelve pages, four megabytes, a cover with a logo, a table of…
Writing for the web
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Text formatting is a budget
Bold, italic, quotation marks and the underline — what each one is for
Someone scanning a page sees what is different before reading what is there. That is the entire mechanism: a marked word works because it is rare. Put bold in every second sentence and the eye stops reading it as a…
Writing for the web
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Kicking out the paragraph
Why text on a screen works better in blocks than in prose
In 1965 a psychologist at Columbia University named Robert Horn began looking at how people cope with large amounts of complicated information. He noticed something that sounds obvious and turns out not to be: the…
Writing for the web