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How to get people to read your blog posts.
Eye-catching image? Check. Snappy headline? Check. You've spent hours tweaking your metaphors, checking your links and verifying your facts. Doesn't mean much if your reader glances at your entry and immediately leaves, does it?
How should you write your pages or blog entries? In the wild and wooly land of Web writing, here are some best practices.
Last week, Michael Agger published an article in Slate called Lazy Bastards. It (somewhat humorously) illustrates Jakob Nielsen's principles about writing for the web. Ironically, though, I found Agger's article much less readable than the originals.
Sample Nielsen tips for scannable pages:- highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
- meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones)
- bulleted lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
Full text at How Users Read on the Web (first sentence: "They don't").
Want more? Try Nielsen's other articles about writing for the Web.
P.S. Don't worry, I won't start bolding everything.
- Rebecca Fureigh's blog
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reading/writing on the web
Rebecca, Thank you. I've been just going from A to Z. I did notice I can't write first in Word and transfer - or maybe I can, with attachment. I don't know how to bullet or bold or cut and paste. Somewhere, I recall seeing a HTML list, but I don't recall where, and it's been years since I used it. Do we use those codes?
I see...
That actually works. I have been working on the eye-catching titles; but i find that i lack that creativeness. It is coming though. Carol illustrates one huge problem I'm also having,especially when it comes to bold and transferring from word. I even tried and online writing tool to see if it might work.
Thanks for the info.
GNM
some HTML thoughts and thinking more deeply about layout
I hear you about the HTML coding stuff, Carol and George. Here's one resource on the web I've used that you can turn to to learn more about how to format your blog posts:
Webmonkey. Here's what they say about themselves: "Webmonkey is a free, public resource for web developers. Builders, designers and programmers like you — the people who know best — write the articles, tutorials, code snippets and other contributions." Their tutorials are written with a wacky sense of humor, but are also very clear. Perhaps even more importantly, they have "cheat sheets" which lay out the basic codes for the kinds of things that Fureigh was mentioning above, once you get the hang of understanding how HTML works.
And please oh please oh please, don't use Word to format your text into HTML. MS Word adds all kinds of ridiculous code to your text in an attempt to make it look exactly like what you have in your document -- and most of the time what you're going to want to do is very straight forward, if you're up for taking about ten minutes to walk through an HTML basics tutorial.
On a less pragmatic note, the thing that I find really interesting about this idea of how to get people to read things on the Internet is that its almost always discussed in terms of eye-catching (with a desperate capture mentality) and with the assumption that people are just not interested in reading very much for very long. I question that assumption, and I wonder why it is that we don't think about these issues in a more explicitly typographic sense.
Most web pages are completely covered with words, in sometimes three and four columns, all in different sizes and colors and in sometimes odd, sometimes ugly relationships to each other. We glance at all of it trying to figure out what words are the ones we need. Web advertising in particular comes to mind as particularly challenging to this process -- not just as something that's generally annoying but annoying because it breaks the flow of the layout. Can you imagine if you had to ignore ads for other books (or refrigerators, or cars, or cheap tickets to Acapulco) on the top and bottom eighths of every page in a hard-back novel? We'd get used to it, sure, but it would trip us up. We'd have to work much harder at maintaining focus and attention on the information that the words we actually want to read are giving us -- and those words would have to work much harder to overcome all the distractions, too.
The thing I want to emphasize is that I'm not just talking about content here (that is, what the words actually mean and the ideas they convey). Nor am I really talking about a web user's willingness to read. Web users read all the time and I think we need to acknowledge that we all have honed skills to help wade through both the detritus of junk writing and the ugliness of junk layout in an attempt to connect and learn and find the information we need. As writers, we can help with the content -- and as newbie HTML coders, we can do our part to help with the layout, too. The simplicity of most HTML code lends itself to that -- so don't let yourself be intimidated!
A guide to the YP4 blog's text editor
This Guide to MyYP4 — it's a PDF — should help. Basically, you can format your entries (though not your comments) by using the buttons below the text box.
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Emily, thank you so much! I
Emily, thank you so much! I needed a quiet summer and it's not happening, but what you've posted is a big help. I want to create tech/engrg/sci/computer sci curriculum for k-5 level in a form teachers can use, within a limited timeframe. (Webmonkey was on my reading list but unvetted, and now it goes to the top.) I just skimmed, have deadlines, but oh - i will come back and follow up, and suspect George will, too.
A lot of folks think kindergarten's too young for engineering. Oh, come on! I never got my erector set or enough tinker toys or lincoln logs - now we have all new building toys, but the girls are no longer discouraged from participating. What is really wierd - after kindergarten, engineering just disappears, until maybe AP math. Duh. Pattern recognition specialists aren't likely to thrive on memorize-and-dump: don't you think our lack of engineers is due to the politicization of our school system? Mmm...well, we all have our pet topics, and I get feisty over the babies...
Oh yes - how I got off track: in the school year before last, I supervised a computer session with kindergarteners, and two of the children were doing the tutoring. (And they were good - they tutored me, too.) The sub just let us do it.
taking kids on their own terms
There is a picture of me that my mom hangs in her kitchen. I'm in pre-school, about 4 years old or so, and I'm sitting with my chin in my hand next to a tower of blocks that is taller than me. I went to a pre-school/daycare center that highly valued creative/constructive play. The head teacher there, Bruce, had been an engineer with AT&T, and was part of the team of folks who figured out how to run a signal in both directions on telephone lines simultaneously (effectively doubling AT&T's capacity instantly). So yeah, a super smart guy...who cared a lot about thinking outside the box, and thinking structurally.
I remember sitting with Bruce near one of my towers (I liked to build them a lot) and explaining to him how, if I could just hold still enough, I could build a tower up to the sky -- and beyond! Forever tall! I did everything I could to make the foundations strong and stable, and I did everything I could to keep my little child hands from shaking...but always, always the towers fell. I speculated that the fault was mine...and workable if I could just figure out a solution... but Bruce explained to me that even if I built a super strong foundation, even if I could hold completely still, my hands and the blocks themselves are made up of tiny atoms that are constantly moving, and the Earth is moving extremely fast beneath us, and all that tiny, minute motion would inevitably add up to the tower falling. He wasn't discouraging me, or telling me that a tower couldn't be built -- he was just expanding my understanding of the problem.
I've never forgotten it, because Bruce was an adult who took kids on their own terms. He didn't assume that we were too immature to understand something, or that things would be too complex. He laid out the complexity of the world as it stands, reaching out to help me (and all of us there) bridge the gaps of our understanding to think bigger.
I'm glad to hear that there are other educators out in the world aiming to engage children in meaningful scientific exploration. I think there's a lot that children have to offer on those terms -- thinking in completely different ways from the ways that adults have become accustomed to. I just loved it when I was a kid -- although you're right, that as an identified-girl-child, that kind of open engineering creativity was dropped shortly after kindergarten, and became elective-oriented in high school and college. And by then, all the socialization around what girls and boys do is chugging along...blargh...
At any rate, a much larger conversation, that. Good luck with your curricula (and the web tutorials)! Talk soon...
I assume you read Arthur C.
I assume you read Arthur C. Clarke. I think he's the one who wrote the novel about a ladder up into space. (It really is possible - Clarke and a lot of other science fiction authors were/are thoretical and applied scientists and engineers.) Honestly it was the guy who moved to Sri Lanka, and I think that was Clarke.
I'm in the midst of trying to move from a repossessed property and comply with Section 8 requirements so I can keep it until I start teaching (presumably in September/late August). So, it's a pretty frantic time. I'm going to summer school full-time, too. But today I bent the ear of the guy I hope will be my new landlord and neighbor, while we waited on the bureaucracy. Ane - I got a cool idea. My family's got dyslexia and engineers on both sides. What if-?
What if we are teaching numbers the wrong way? There is nothing intuitive nor writ in stone about the alphabet we use for writing. It's tradition, from a tradition closely held by a very few for a very long time: it was therefore designed to be difficult to decode, not easy.
What if we teach the initial numbers as PICTURES? Not the domino effect of '60s "new math" -
Every kid likes gummis. One gummi worm as the picture for "one" or "1" (a tall, straight gummi, being signed up for serious work). Two gummi worms make a half-ess (or a half-circle, if you need to censor) and a solid base, an illustration of the glass half-full or half-empty. (Mine's always been the upper half - it totally closes the mind of anyone in mental health, but engineers get it.) Three gummi worms in two arcs and a sortuva w make a "3." This guy's gone beyond me and you to "us" - so three is a social number. Any kid gets that 3 is the same as a big group, in terms of social complexity. Four gummi worms is a theoretical structure...not a desktop, because the parallel lines are offset....
No, not every kid would "get" this, but you wouldn't lose potential engineers (applied theorists) by turning the wonder of math into the "cram and dump" architecture of modern schools.
Honestly, I think there's still a little shine left from the lightbulb that went on for me. Why? I had permission.... permission is a (the?) key aspect to learning.
I sure wish I could meet that engineer/nursery teacher. I taught myself the predecessor of C language while decoding eqpt. printouts for AT&T in plant engineering. Got in trouble for "editing" (learned 20 years later it was patch programming). The deal was, you had to id where one piece of eqpt. ended, by looking it up in codebooks, then mark it off and decode the next eqpt. item. You COULDN't skip - you wouldn't know where the next item began. So - it HAD to be perfect and, um, I was brought up in Kansas - perfect or as close as you could come was expected. The only way to ease my constant migraines was to solve any errors.
I wasn't supposed to be able to do that.
So - now I want to help prevent other kids from being baffled by what should be their favorite subject. And I think gummis just might be the key. (You get the number right, you get to eat it....)
arthur c. clarke
Space ELEVATOR is what I meant, not ladder. Definitely possible.