Writing for the web

Kicking out the paragraph

Nobody reads a web page. They look for the one bit that answers their question, and they leave when they can’t find it. Good web copy is built for that, and it takes two things at once: blocks and plain words.

September 2026

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 paragraph is not a unit of anything. It has no agreed size, no agreed job, no agreed boundary. One paragraph carries a single fact, the next carries an argument, a warning, an aside and half of the following point. Writers know when to start one by feel. Readers, and above all readers who are looking rather than reading, cannot rely on it at all.

So he replaced it. In his method — later trademarked as Information Mapping, and available without the trademark as structured writing — the unit is the block: a chunk of text organised around one subject, with one purpose, carrying a label that says what it is. Rarely more than nine sentences. Blocks group into maps, maps into documents. Horn is remembered in technical writing circles as the man who kicked the paragraph out of writing, which is a good line and slightly unfair: what he really did was give the paragraph a job description.

The paragraph is not a unit of anything. It has no agreed size, no agreed job, no agreed boundary.

Why this suits the web so well

Horn was writing about manuals and policy documents, decades before anyone had a website. But his unit turned out to fit the screen better than it ever fitted paper, for a reason he could not have planned: on the web, nothing is read in the order it was written.

People arrive halfway down a page from a search result. They scan the left edge for a heading that looks like their question, read that one piece, and go. A page is not a text they move through; it is a shelf they reach into. A block is exactly the right size for that reach: small enough to take in at a glance, complete enough to be worth something on its own, labelled clearly enough to be found without reading its neighbours.

The same shape pays off three more times. A well-labelled block is what a search engine can quote as an answer. It is what an AI assistant lifts when someone asks it a question your page happens to answer — and it will lift the block with the honest heading over the one buried in a clever introduction. And it is what a screen reader can move through, heading by heading, the way a sighted visitor moves their eye. Structure written for the person in a hurry turns out to serve the person who cannot see the screen, and the machines besides. That is not a coincidence: they are all doing the same thing, which is looking for the part that matters.

What a block asks of you

One subject, stated in the heading. The heading is a promise about what follows, so it should say the thing rather than name the department: “What it costs” beats “Financial considerations”, and “How to cancel” beats “Cancellation policy”. If a block needs a heading with “and” in it, it is two blocks.

One purpose. Horn sorted information by what it is for — a procedure, a rule, a fact, a concept — and kept the kinds apart. That distinction survives every rewrite of every method since, because mixing them is what makes text tiring: a reader who is following steps and hits a paragraph of background has to stop being a doer and start being a student.

Short enough to be taken in whole. The method leans on Miller’s famous seven-plus-or-minus-two, which is weaker science than half a century of business slides have made of it. You do not need the number. You need the habit behind it: assume your reader is holding several things in mind already, and is giving you a fraction of the attention you gave the writing.

Self-contained. A block that begins “As mentioned above” is broken, because on the web there is no above — there is a search result, a deep link, a fragment quoted somewhere else. Write each piece as though it may be the first thing a stranger sees, because it may well be.

Structure is only half of it

Here is where the method, left to itself, goes wrong. You can chunk, label and nest a text impeccably and still say nothing anyone can use. Neat boxes full of “facilitate”, “leverage”, “in accordance with the applicable provisions” are worse than a rambling page in plain speech, because they look finished. That is a well-organised fog.

Neat boxes full of jargon are worse than a rambling page in plain speech, because they look finished.

Plain language is the other half, and it is not the same skill. Structure decides where a reader looks; words decide whether the looking was worth it. In practice it comes down to a handful of stubborn habits: the everyday word over the official one, the active sentence over the passive, the thing before the qualification, one idea per sentence, and no term your reader would have to look up unless you explain it where you first use it. None of that is dumbing down. It is the difference between writing that has been finished and writing that has merely been delivered.

Run the two together and each covers the other’s weakness. Plain words in an unstructured page give you a readable wall — pleasant, and still impossible to search with your eye. Blocks in official language give you a filing cabinet nobody can open. Together they give you something rarer than either: a page a stranger can use on the first attempt.

Where I don’t apply it

Not every text is a shelf. An argument has to be built, and building takes a sentence that leans on the one before it; chop that into labelled chunks and you get staccato, and lose the reader for a different reason. This piece is not written in blocks, and it shouldn’t be.

The rule I use is simple enough to say in one line: if the reader came to do something, write blocks; if they came to understand something, write prose. Most websites are mostly the first kind and are written almost entirely in the second — which is, in the end, Horn’s point, sixty years old and still not taken.

Wondering whether your own pages read like a shelf or like a wall? That is part of what I look at in a website review: the structure, the words, and whether a stranger can get what they came for. See what that involves, or email me at hello@alligatordesign.net.