AaronTurpen.com

I’ve had a couple of people approach me with questions about how writing for the Web differs from writing for print.  The difference boils down to one thing: how people read online versus with paper and ink in their hands.

Print publications, such as magazines and even some newspapers, often have their writers create two versions of an article: one for print, one for the Internet.  Or the editor simply pares down the print version to include it on the Web.  In either case, they’re doing it for one reason: readability.

Reading Habits Offline and On

Our reading habits when we’re sitting in a comfortable chair with a magazine in hand and a fresh beverage at our elbow are very different than those we have when sitting in an office chair looking at a computer screen.  In the comfy chair, we’ll take our time, read all of the information and absorb it slowly.  For most, this type of reading is as much for pleasure as it is for information.

When in the office chair in front of the monitor, however, our reading tends to be more about business.  Most readers of online material scan, rather than reading each word and sentence.  As with a newspaper, readers are likely to read only the first paragraph or two, hit the bullet points or otherwise highlighted text, and be done with it.

There are exceptions to this, as with anything else, of course.  Fiction and poetry are obvious exceptions, as a rule.

Writing for Those Habits

So if you’re writing for online publication versus print, this will change how your audience interacts with your work.  Writing using the general upturned-pyramid, as discussed in last week’s Associated Press Style article, is important, whether you’re writing news or not.

The real key, however, is the first paragraph.  You need to hook your audience quickly and that first paragraph is where it needs to happen.  If done well, this can eliminate most skimming.

The other option is to use the hook, but include a lot of bullet points, highlighted lists, or bold text to convey the basic information in a few choice words and phrases throughout the piece.

Either approach works and both of them combined can do a lot for reader retention and interaction.

As an example, if you go through past posts here on AaronTurpen.com, you’ll see that most of my articles have short paragraphs, have headings to break them up into sections for the reader, etc.  This is what helps the reader’s flow.  Short paragraphs make the text look more airy and thus easier to read, removing the stigma of an over-academic appearance.  The headings breaking up the articles into sections make it easier to digest and gives the reader’s eyes something to focus on to gather the general subject matter in that portion of the article.

All of this means better readership, more reader retention, and a higher acceptance for your writing.

When I began this blog, I wrote a sort of overview of the various types of writing and the differences between them.  One of those I mentioned was the Associated Press (AP) style.  It gets its name, of course, from the AP and is the basic presentation most journalistic writing uses.

Whole university courses are dedicated to teaching the AP style, but most of it can be congealed to a few hundred words.  After that, it’s a matter of practice to master it.  For me, this style of writing is a constant struggle – I have a tendency to ramble.

Every so often, the Associated Press releases a new edition of The Associated Press Stylebook, which began publication in 1977.  This contains the guidelines for writing in the AP style and is the handbook from which all of the aforementioned university courses and editors guide their teaching.

The Core of AP Style

Most of the style hinges on the general format and layout of your piece.  You may have heard of the Inverted Pyramid (pictured here) for conveying information.  That is the basis for nearly all of today’s news reporting.

In this method, all of the most important information for your article appears in the first couple of paragraphs.  The lead sentence for the article encapsulates the “why” for the reader to get engaged in the story while the first paragraph contains all of the pertinent “who, what, when, where, how” (the “Ws”).  The second and possibly third paragraph convey the rest of the pertinent facts and information to complete the Ws.

From that point on, the rest of the article is merely filling in the information to substantiate and explain the first couple of paragraphs.  It is important to remember two things that drive all news reporting: newsprint readers generally read the headline (title) and the first two to three paragraphs – about 200 words – of a story.  Few readers read beyond that point.  That, for the reporter, means that everything needs to be concisely crammed into the first couple of hundred words (or less).

This is the very core of the Associated Press style of writing.  It is the basic news reporting style that has been used, fundamentally, since journalism began.  For most writers, it is the hardest part of the AP style to master.

Other AP Style Considerations

The rest of the style considerations for AP news are mostly to guide standardizations for abbreviations, punctuation, and so forth.  Unless you’re writing for a syndicated AP-affiliated news outlet, however, these are less important than mastering the inverted pyramid.  They are, however, considered conventional for most journalism, even online, so they are worth a quick mention.

Numbers are probably the most-often confused aspect of the AP Style.  The rule is fairly simple, though: any number up to ten is spelled out (one, two, three, four, five.. nine), after that, use Arabics (10, 11, 12..).  The rest are detailed semantics.

Abbreviations are also often confusing to the writer.  Most of the abbreviations used in AP writing are nations, states, and so forth.  These require no explanation to the reader, so printing U.S. (never “US”) doesn’t need to be qualified before using the abbreviation.  So in the following, the two abbreviations are correct:

In the U.S., the Department of Transportation (DOT) is..

States, on the other hand, do not use the Postal Service two-letter abbreviation, but instead use the common shorthand abbreviation.  So Arizona becomes “Ariz.” and South Dakota becomes “S.D.”  States with one word names are abbreviated to three or four characters while states with two word names are abbreviated to two letters with periods between (and no spaces).

The rest of the style details are concerned with specifics such as how to handle dates, times, punctuation, and titles for both people and publications.  Much of this will likely be handled by the editor and copy layout people at the publication rather than the writer.  There are a lot of details here and they make up the majority of the AP’s Stylebook.