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Writing for print vs. Writing for the web

September 12, 2007 |

Writing for print

Print publications tend to favour articles with short, punchy sentences, information that is attributed to well known sources and articles that are written in the reverse pyramid structure (the most important information in the beginning and gradually bulking down as it continues). Space is often a factor and articles are edited accordingly. Different rules apply with headlines; i.e. - Online you would be fine to write an article like “How to open up a beer using your belly button” but in print you would be asked to rewrite (belly button beer opener?).

Another thing is that most fun and unusual punctuation and structure are frowned upon because the text on a printed page must look uniform for the ads to really be able to bounce(parentheses are out of the question).

Writing for the web

Online publications usually include a lot of keywords and keyword phrases in their copy. The text is written with search engines and the terms that people will be searching for when their page shows up. A lot of publications now are bending the traditional rules of article writing due to the increased popularity of social media sites. Lead paragraphs are especially affected as it pertains to the way media is gobbled up by users of Digg or StumbleUpon. Space isn’t as important because of the many ways that content from a given site can be parsed; i.e. - RSS feeds, MyYahoo, ect.

Internet copy writers can get away with a lot more as far as use of cliches, slang or loose grammar values.

Writing for the reader

This doesn’t include any of the above. It can have certain aspects of both styles if they are properly balanced, but neither needs to be there. Writing for the reader consists mainly of just being hospitable. It is not just opening your post with an introduction, barking out some facts and then leaving and leaving the reader to wallow through your words like a textbook. It is welcoming them to your page and greeting them warmly at the start of a post. Telling them some things about your life that they don’t especially have to know. Make the reader feel included and they will stick around.

Bring it all together

The key is take equal parts of writing for online and writing for print and present them for the reader. It is good to include some aspects of web copywriting to make your stories easier to find and the reader will thank you for that. Its also great to keep it to a mimimum and maintain an engaging factor in your writing that doesn’t just repeat terms for the sake of Google and your reader will definitely thank you for that.

Tagged : Writing, blogging

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