The 5 most boring pieces of advice for web writers

Posted: July 10th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

I’m getting this tomorrow:

Yahoo style guide

I have some high hopes for it – but it’ll probably turn out to be the same balls everyone writes about web copy.

There are 1001 blogs out there telling people how to write for the web. Some are great, but the vast majority their time giving budding bloggers, editors and copywriters the same 5 bits of advice:

  • be brief
  • be relevant
  • be accurate
  • have catchy, intriguing titles
  • for the love of God don’t try to write with any kind of charm, grace or wit! Do you think this is the 19th century and you’re Charles Bloody Dickens? People on the internet have a gnat-like attention span! Imagine you’re writing for a 7-year-old who’s mainlining Sunny Delight and who is constantly being distracted by pop-ups of kittens on skateboards! KITTENS! ON SKATEBOARDS!

It’s all probably true, but I wish just once in a while, one of these bloggers would mention the  sheer joy of the eccentric,  irrelevant, mysterious, rambling and extravagantly sesquipedelian prose that is the glory of the web.

  • http://behindblueeyes.co.uk Blue Eyes

    Just write what you want to write about. Aiming to be popular is surely the worst possible starting point.

  • buenosam

    The ones I’m talking about are mostly trying to teach people to make money on the web, so in some ways it’s fair enough. But I’ve been on expensive courses for proper web editors where they went on and on about brevity as well, and I think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – everyone is taught from a young age to write like Boing Boing, and that’s what becomes known as ‘good web writing’.