The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World

Up until now, Web writers have mostly relied on guidance from traditional, i.e., print-oriented, guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style, The Elements of Style, and The Associated Press Stylebook.  (The AP Stylebook does, however, address many Web terms.)

An excellent guide that does offer a thorough overview of issues in writing for the Web is Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works by Janice (Ginny) Redish (2007).

Yahoo! is many things.  It’s a major Internet services company that’s well known for its Web portal, search engine, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and social media services.  But, as far as I know, Yahoo! has never been known for a high standard of writing on its various sites.  We should wait and see what this new style guide covers.

According to pre-publication announcements, Yahoo!’s new style guide will “cover the basics of grammar and punctuation as well as Web-specific ways to perfect a site, such as: identifying the audience and making the site accessible to everyone; constructing clear and compelling copy; developing a site’s unique voice; streamlining text for mobile devices; optimizing Web pages to increase the chances of appearing in search results; and streamlining text so that people can read your pages at Internet speed.”

The Yahoo! style guide has earned praise from Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., a leading Web usability consultant who calls it an “Excellent and eminently useful book with many compelling examples of rewrites. While rewriting content for usability will hugely increase a website’s business value, the word list alone can save you the cost of the book by eliminating wasted time arguing over proper usage.”

I expect to buy a copy of the guide when it comes out and I’ll be joining my fellow blogger Crawford Kilian over at Writing for the Web in hoping that “it has something sensible to say about any company that insists on including an exclamation mark in its name.”  (We Crawfords have to stick together.)

In his excellent 1993 book (updated in 2002), Write Tight: How to Keep Your Prose Sharp, Focused and Concise, William Brohaugh gives us a handy exercise that gets results.

Go back to something you wrote a year or so ago – a blog post, a magazine article, a business report, or a poem – and look for fluff.  Ask yourself how tight it is, not how good it is.  Chances are, you’ll see redundancies, unnecessary words, or phrases that just don’t contribute to the writing.  You may see that you meandered off the subject.  Delete the words and phrases that don’t belong.  I bet the new version gets to the point much faster.

Each time you cut something that shouldn’t be there, the remaining words shine brighter; they work harder.

When you revisit your writing with an eye on concision, you’ll likely see that you can improve your tight-writing skills.

We’re Web Scanners

People don’t read websites – they scan.  They aren’t reading for pleasure; they’re looking for information.  This is why you must put your essential information first.

Eye-tracking studies prove that website visitors pay attention to the top of an article – the title and the first paragraph – and then quickly scan down the left margin.  If they don’t see something meaningful right away, they’ll move on.

Traditional Method vs. the Inverted Pyramid

• In school we learned to write essays in the narrative style – starting with an introduction, following with the main body of relevant points in some logical order, and ending with the main point or conclusion.
• Busy web readers don’t have time for narratives when they’re looking for information.  So says Ginny Redish in her excellent book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works.  She promotes the “inverted pyramid” style, which begins with the main point, follows with relevant supporting information (use bullet points here), and ends with background information.

Redish’s new book belongs on every website owner’s bookshelf.  It’s a thorough overview of the issues in writing for the web and has earned high praise from leaders in web usability.