Editorial Style

This helpful guide gave tips on how not to overload surfers with information, and how to format information effectively within the context of a website.

Along with text, this piece incorporated a few images with captions, which, though a little blurry, was helpful to get a visual of the concepts being explained.

The key to successful online prose is to write in a way that "is concise and structured for scanning" -- basically making the page skim-friendly. An interesting technique for conveying information in an expedient way is by writing with the model of the inverted pyramid, but with the conclusion at the beginning of the text (144).

Thinning out what, in print documents, might be thick paragraphs of information helps readers read quickly, but the author also notes that one does not want to necessarily "dumb down" the information while making it more skeletal. What I basically envisioned when this was described was Losh's "Digital Rhetoric:Genres, Disciplines, and Trends" (do I use quotes or underlines with that title? :-{ ). What Losh does not seem to do is add the TARGET = "main" to her tags so that a separate window opens, rather that having another window take over the initial window that the site inhabited (149). I always hate when that happens, especially when people send me an e-mail with a link that takes me away from the e-mail I hadn't completed reading yet. Anyway. Instead of taking the audience away from the website, frames should "allow you to supply commentary on material in another site and also maintain navigation links back to your site" (150).

A plethora of links within a certain amount of prose might prove to be a distraction (I'm visualizing now Wikipedia). As the author states, "it's pointless to write a paragraph and then fill it with links to go elsewhere" (150). So frugality of links within prose is encouraged, and a tactic that might encourage this frugality is to "group all minor, illustrative, parenthetic, or footnote links at the bottom of the page" (151).

There are many other points about making an effective site have to do with (of course) design and audience. Web authors are encouraged to be cognizant of tasteful link colors, and eye-catching approaches to headlines and subheadings. They also talk about "thinking globally" when typing in dates, so that you use a format recognizable to all.

Much of the guide was essentially about how to pragmatically apply "flow" to web composition.