Short, to the point, and boring.
I suppose that I can understand why technical writing and the World Wide Web seem
to go together - it's a Jakob Nielsen sort of thing in which the objective is
to get to the point, and fast. The assumption is that readers on the web are there
to find something, and then to leave. I've complained about this in the past,
but I suppose that three years ago is a long enough
time for me to be permitted to do so again. As before, my interests are almost
diametrically different - I find that meandering reading on the web, something
along the lines of - "hey, maybe that might be an interesting link",
or "one more digression can't hurt" - to be what's most interesting
and enjoyable about the web reading experience.
But technical writing isn't going to disappear, and certainly not on the web.
An official document from the Washington State Department of Health, devoted to
Writing
for Interest and Understanding tells us:
In
general,
shorter
is
better:
try
to
keep
paragraphs
between
six
and
twelve
lines,
words
to
two
to
three
syllables,
and
sentences
to
no
more
than
fourteen
words.
I've also read somewhere that paragraphs should be no more than three sentences,
though I suppose that that's a corollary that can be surmised from having sentences
that contain only fourteen word and about eight lines to the paragraph (and, I
suppose it goes without saying, large fonts). Perhaps this sort of writing is
a compliment to the sort of content that many sites want to make available to
us.
Go to: Now what did he mean by that?, or
Go to: Content? Did somebody mention content?