8 Tuning Up Your Sentences
Now that you’ve planned your content, broken up your documents, decided on your essential messages, and designed your web pages, let’s talk about writing the paragraphs, sentences, and words of your web content.
As you write, remember these three principles from Chapter 1:
As you write:
You might keep photos and short descriptions of your personas on your cubicle corkboard or on your desk. If you are part of a team, the team might keep persona posters on the wall of the conference room that you use to review draft web content.
Writing informally is not “dumbing down’
Language changes over time. It always has. Standards for good writing also change over time. They always have.
Style in nineteenth-century novels differs from style in twentieth-century novels, which, in turn, differs from the emerging style of twenty-first-century novels.
Similarly, people’s expectations of appropriate style for information (instructions, notices, short essays) have changed over time. Over the past 100 years, writing style for communicating useful information has become much less formal. And that trend is accelerating with the web.
This is not “dumbing down"! It’s communicating clearly. It’s writing so that busy people can understand what you are saying the first time that they read it.
Ten guidelines for tuning up your sentences
These 10 guidelines will help you write clear and effective paragraphs, sentences, and words:
Lists and tables – great ways to tune up your sentences – get their own chapter after this one.
1. Talk to your site visitors. Use “you’
If you are telling people something about themselves or something that applies to them, talk to them. Use “you.” That makes the information inviting and personal.
You can convey serious and important messages – even legal rules and notices – using “you.” In fact, people are much more likely to take in those messages if you write with “you” because they can see themselves in the text.
Compare Figures 8-1 and 8-2. Which version of the information about Australians sending food to the U. S. is easier to read? Which would you rather read? Which would you pay more attention to?
Figure 8-1 The original text of one paragraph from the middle of new requirements for mailing food from Australia to the U. S.
Writing that has no personal pronouns often has other problems as well. Just in this one paragraph, we also find passive voice, nouns that hide verbs, and a step that is implied but not clearly stated. The notice that this bit came from also has information in the wrong order, outdated information, and other problems. As you write and revise web content, think about all the guidelines together.
I analyze and rewrite the entire notice as Case Study 8-4 at the end of this chapter.
Be consistent; don’t mix nouns and “you” when talking about the same person
In Figure 8-3, instructions for registering for classes, people may be confused because one sentence talks about “the student” and the next talks about “you.” If these are the same people, why not use “you” throughout?
Use appropriate nouns to talk about others
If you are talking about other people, things, or situations, use a name or description rather than “you.” You can still keep the sentences short and active, as in Figure 8-4.
Figure 8-3 Using “you” whenever you are talking to your site visitors makes information both friendlier and easier to grasp quickly.
Figure 8-4 When giving facts, start with the topic – here, that’s butterflies and moths. That sets the context for your readers and helps you write active sentences.
Use the imperative in instructions
If you are giving hints or tips or instructions, use the imperative. That’s just the verb by itself without “you.” For example, “Run!” “Think!” and “Do!” are all imperatives. Figure 8-5 shows you a list of imperatives in tips about house hunting.
Use “you” rather than “he or she’
Using “you” also has another advantage: It saves you from gender-specific writing. In English, the third-person singular pronouns (he, she, him, her, his, hers) are gender specific. When you use one of these pronouns, some readers will think that you mean only people of that gender. To avoid even the perception of being exclusionary, avoid gender-specific writing when you are writing about or to both men and women.
If you write “employee,” “customer,” or “contractor,” you may have a problem referring to that person later in the sentence or paragraph. Workarounds, such as combining the two genders into “s/he” or “he or she,” are awkward.
“You” is not gender-specific. As you can see in Figure 8-6, the sentences with “you” or the imperative avoid the gender pronoun problem and also speak more directly to site visitors.
Of course, if you are talking about a specific person, it’s fine to name the person and to use the appropriate gender-based pronoun to refer to that person. Figure 8-7 is a brief item about how well Jimmy Rollins was doing playing baseball.
Figure 8-7 Gender pronouns are okay if you’re talking about a specific person. www.baseballcrank.com/archives2/baseball_2005/index/php
More on gender-neutral writing
Here are four techniques for gender-neutral writing:
The customer may return any item she is not satisfied with.
You may return any item you are not satisfied with.
A contractor must renew his insurance every year.
Contractors must renew their insurance every year.
A prospective student must turn in his or her application at least two weeks before classes start.
A prospective student must apply at least two weeks before classes start.
Your supervisor must explain her decision in writing.
Your supervisor must explain the decision in writing.
2. Show that you are a person and that your organization includes people
Let’s turn to the other side of the conversation. In web writing, it’s appropriate to use “I’ or “we” for yourself and the organization you are writing for.
If you are blogging, “I” is fine
Bloggers often write about personal experiences and opinions. The singular pronoun “I” is appropriate. Figure 8-8 is a Tunisian blogger’s admiration for local craft work.
If you are writing your own articles, “I” is fine
You may be the sole author of an article or opinion piece or a story. “I” is appropriate; it’s your voice as author; your voice in the conversation with the people coming to see what you are saying. In Figure 8-9, Lou Manfredini makes ladder safety very personal.
If you are writing for an organization, use “we’
When you are writing for an organization, use the plural pronouns: “we,” “us,” “our.” Most web sites do this at least on the Contact Us page, as Lego does in Figure 8-10.
You should use “we,” “us,” and “our” throughout the site, not just on the Contact Us page. A major goal of most web sites is to have people get information for themselves without calling or using a live chat option. The more you do to make your site visitors feel that you are in the conversation with them on all your web pages, the more comfortable most people feel.
Figure 8-11 shows you how Bed Bath & Beyond puts small conversational notes on the pages with items it is selling. Figure 8-12 shows you how even a government agency (the U. S. Social Security Administration) can be friendly and conversational.
Sometimes, it’s okay to talk about the organization by name
If policies or standards in your company or agency don’t allow you to use “we,” push to change the policies or standards. If you can’t – or if, in fact, it makes sense to refer to the company or agency by name – you can still write clear, active sentences.
Sears could have changed some of the references in Figure 8-13 to “we,” but they may have repeatedly used the name and not the pronoun to emphasize that they want you to join the Sears team.
For questions and answers, use “I” and “you” for the site visitor, “we” for the organization
If you follow the advice in this book, you’ll find yourself writing in question-and-answer style for at least some of your web content. Web writers often ask me how to use pronouns in these questions and answers.
When the site visitor is asking the question, I suggest using
When the site is asking the question, I suggest using
3. Write in the active voice (most of the time)
When you write in conversational style, you’ll also find yourself writing mostly active sentences. Active sentences help people grab information quickly and easily.
Sentences in the active voice (active sentences) describe “who does what to whom.” In an active sentence, the person or thing doing the action (the actor) comes before the verb. That’s the logical word order for English sentences.
Sentences in the passive voice (passive sentences) start with the object that is acted on rather than with the actor. They either put the actor after the verb in a “by ...” phrase or they leave the actor out entirely. Figure 8-14 gives you examples of active and passive sentences.
Figure 8-14 Sentences in the active voice put the actor (the “doer”) before the verb. In most situations, active sentences are easier to understand than passive sentences.
I am not saying that every sentence must be in the active voice. When you want to focus on the object or when it really does not matter who is responsible for doing the action, the passive voice may be appropriate.
When an entire web page is in the passive, however, people have a very hard time reading it. Their eyes glaze over; they lose interest. Too much of the passive voice is both boring and really difficult to understand.
Figure 8-15 is a set of instructions from a university web site about ordering laboratory supplies. If you had to order something, what would you do? Would you ask a colleague to show you how to do it rather than try to make sense of this web page?
In a fascinating study some years ago (with pages from a published document that was very much like the web example in Figure 8-15), the researchers asked people to read the pages and say everything they were thinking out loud. The people in the study translated what they read as they went along, turning the writing into active sentences with actors and action verbs. That’s a lot of mental work. And the readers misinterpreted many of the passive sentences; their translations were wrong.
“The Scenario Principle” by Flower, Hayes, and Swartz. You’ll find the full reference in the bibliography.
Figure 8-15 An example of how the passive voice can make web content difficult to understand and use.
Remember that we are trying to help busy people grab what they need. In most situations, people get the information from active sentences more quickly and more accurately than from passive sentences. And writing in the active voice pressures you to find out who is responsible for actions – information that your site visitors often need to know.
Figure 8-16 shows how we could make the web content in Figure 8-15 easy for people to use quickly and accurately.
4. Write simple, short, straightforward sentences
Busy web users have no time to untangle long, convoluted sentences. Try to keep your sentences to about 10 to 20 words.
Here are three critical tips for keeping sentences short and simple:
If people have to read a sentence more than once to understand it, rewrite it.
Very short sentences are okay, too
Sentences do not need even 10 words to be meaningful and sharp. If you write in questions and answers, a short answer may be all that people need.
Fragments may also work
The personality, tone, and style of your site may make sentence fragments acceptable to your readers. Consider the description of a blog in Figure 8-17. The sentence fragments work well here.
Even in very serious writing, busy web users need sentences they can understand easily
Simple, short, and straightforward sentences are critical for serious topics. In fact, the more complex the topic, the more you need to be sure that you are writing in a clear, coherent way so that your web site visitors understand your essential messages.
Figure 8-18 shows how the writers at Revenue Canada use short, active sentences to explain what a corporation is and that corporations must pay tax.
Finding your voice and style
Clear and simple writing need not be monotonous. Your writing can have character and flavor and also be clear. The writing style you use should match the overall personality and tone of your site: formal/informal/irreverent/fun/serious, and so on.
For example, doesn’t the “Huh? What does that mean?” in this excerpt from GasPriceWatch.com give you a sense of the writer’s personality and style? Does it make you want to continue to read – to continue to be in a conversation with this site?
5. Cut unnecessary words
Sometimes, sentences are longer than necessary because the writer uses several words where one (or none) will do.
The San Francisco Zoo could cut many words from Figure 8-19 without losing any meaning. As you can see in Figure 8-20, the heading and the links are all you need to give the essential messages. Today, colored underlined words send the message “click on me.”
6. Give extra information its own place
In English, once we find the subject of the sentence (the noun or pronoun at the beginning), we expect to find the verb close by. If extra information takes us off on a tangent, we may lose track of what the sentence is all about. When the extra information ends, and we are back in the main sentence, we may get back on track – and then forget the tangential information.
Don’t put extra “stuff” between the subject and the verb. Case Study 8-1, Untangling a convoluted sentence, shows you both how tangled a sentence can get in web content and how you can untangle it.
Case Study 8-1: Untangling a convoluted sentence
Do you find it easy to grab the information from the following sentence?
Finding the underlying sentence in all these tangles
Let’s untangle the overstuffed sentence by finding the subject, verb, and object of the sentence.
Now you can see that the writer has stuffed the date between the subject and the verb and the address between the verb and the object.
Revising the sentence into good web writing
Wouldn’t it be easier for your site visitors if we gave the information like this?
Considering the site visitors’ scenarios
The revised version also matches the order in which the site visitor needs the information. It matches different people’s scenarios.
Learning from this case study
A sentence with many commas probably has extra information stuffed into it. This case study shows us how to untangle sentences like this.
7. Keep paragraphs short
Your seventh-grade teacher probably never wrote for the web. The type of writing that you did in school (essays, reports, stories) was different from typical writing for the web. For a traditional essay, you were probably taught to write with at least three sentences and more likely five or six sentences in each paragraph. That’s too long for a web paragraph.
On the web, a one-sentence paragraph is fine
Keep your web paragraphs very short. On many web news sites, you see paragraphs that have only one or two sentences each, as in Figure 8-21, reporting on a soccer match.
Lists and tables may be better than paragraphs
In many cases, you can take information out of sentences and make it more scannable with lists or tables. That’s what the next chapter is all about. Before we get there, however, let’s consider the last 3 of the 10 guidelines for tuning up your sentences.
8. Start with the context – first things first, second things second
Start each paragraph with a topic sentence – a sentence that sets the context, that tells readers what the paragraph is about.
Even within a sentence, always set the context first. Research shows that people jump to act as soon as they see something that tells them to act. They don’t always read on to see if more information restricts the action. That’s the problem with a sentence like the one in Figure 8-22, from eHow’s instructions on getting wine stains out of fabric.
Putting the “if” clause first gives people the restricting (context) information before they find out how to act (Figure 8-23).
For a fascinating study showing that people don’t wait for the context, see Dixon, 1987.
You’ll see the whole eHow page that this piece comes from in the next chapter on lists (Figures 9-18 and 9-19).
Figure 8-22 Putting the context after the action may cause sad consequences. Research shows that people act without reading the whole sentence.
Carroll and his colleagues also noted this “jump to act” behavior when they watched people using software manuals. See Carroll, 1990.
Your first reaction to the paragraph in Case Study 8-2 may be “huh?” As you consider it, however, I think you’ll quickly see that it has the same problem as the example in Figure 8-22.
Case Study 8-2: Starting with the context – the topic
Is the following paragraph instantly clear? If not, consider what you would do with this information if you were telling it to someone on the phone. Which part of this sentence would you say first? What would come next? How would you break up the information?
Approved fumigation with methyl bromide at normal atmospheric pressure, in accordance with the following procedure, upon arrival at the port of entry, is hereby prescribed as a condition of importation for shipments of yams.
Slightly simplified from a U. S. Department of Agriculture regulation
Reversing the order
If you were to say the content of this sentence to someone, you would probably reverse the order of the information. You would start with the yams because that’s the answer to the question, “What are we talking about?” The yams are the context, the topic, the connection to what the web user came looking for. The yams belong at the beginning, as in this suggested revision:
Learning from this case study
Once again, we see how focusing on the reader helps you write well for the web. When you are writing specific web content, think about the specific knowledge your site visitors come with.
The principle of “context, topic, known” before “new” is sometimes also called “given – new.” See the work of linguists H. H. Clark and Susan Haviland on “Comprehension and the given-new contract.”
9. Put the action in the verbs, not the nouns
Much of the web is about action, and verbs are the action words. Even in essays and articles, you are probably talking about people doing things. Doing = action = verbs.
If you bury the action in a noun, the verb often becomes just an uninteresting placeholder. Take the action out of the noun and put it in the verb, where it belongs.
Here’s a table of the most common endings for nouns that hide verbs. Use this to help you keep the action in the verb and not in the nouns.
| Look for this | As in this example | Which should be this verb |
|---|---|---|
| -a | denial | deny |
| -ance | maintenance | maintain, keep up |
| -ence | concurrence | concur, agree |
| -ment | assignment | assign |
| -sion | transmission | transmit, send |
| -tion | recommendation | recommend |
| -ure | failure | fail, if you don’t |
10. Use your web users’ words
Think about your audience! is a good mantra on every level of web writing – deciding what content to cover, constructing sentences and paragraphs, and choosing words.
Your web users may not know words that are commonplace to you. How many web users are likely to understand the instruction for using the Search function on the Express Order site in Figure 8-24?
Some writers try to sound impressive by using big words. If those big words aren’t ones your readers know, they won’t be impressed. They’ll give up on your web site and go to someone else who speaks their language.
Compare the words in two versions of information for parents on childhood asthma (Figures 8-25 and 8-26). Both say they are meant for parents, but one uses clinical, medical words; the other talks in ordinary people’s words. Both have questions as headings, but one says, “What is the incidence of asthma?” and the other says, “How common is asthma in children?”
We all read the simple, short, common words faster
Even highly educated, sophisticated readers do best with plain English writing. They are often the busiest and most impatient of your site visitors, so words that they recognize most quickly work best. And we all recognize and read the most common words more quickly than less common ones. Here’s a very short list of just a few words to change. You can create your own much longer list.
| Instead of this | try this |
|---|---|
| obtain | get |
| prior to | before |
| purchase | buy |
| request | ask for |
| subsequent | next |
| terminate | end |
| utilize | use |
Consider your broad web audience
You may be saying: “We have special words that have specific meaning in our field. We have to use them.” If everyone you are communicating with shares your technical language, then it’s fine to use it.
You should offer your web content in many languages and in culturally appropriate ways for audiences in other countries and for diverse audiences in your own country. Localizing web sites is an important topic, but it is beyond the scope of this book.
But think about these facts:
Putting it all together
Let’s close this chapter with two case studies that bring together several of the guidelines. In Case Study 8-3, I apply several guidelines to a paragraph for doctors about getting a medical license. In Case Study 8-4, I return to the example that started this chapter and show you the entire page about Australians shipping food to the U. S.
Case Study 8-3: Applying several guidelines to one paragraph
As you write or revise your web content, you will often find yourself using many guidelines at the same time.
Consider this paragraph from the American Medical Association’s web site. It is advice to doctors who are considering moving and getting licensed in a new area.
By attending to all these problems together, we can make this web content much easier for very busy doctors to grab quickly and go on to getting the task done.
Case Study 8-4: Revising an entire web article
An important aspect of web management is keeping information up to date. Plan to review and revise regularly. Take the opportunity when you are bringing information up to date to also rethink your web content based on what you have learned in this book.
Consider the article from the Australia Post site that you saw in Figure 8-1. Here is the entire page as I captured it in 2006:
What would we want to fix?
Bringing the article up to date allows us to drop information that was needed only in the transition period that ended in August 2004.
While we are doing that, we can also make the article much easier for people to understand and use.
First, we would bring the exception to the top of the article. Never make people read a lot only to discover that the information does not apply to them!
Then, we would make the process much more obvious by addressing the reader directly and by breaking out each of the three steps. For writing rules, the appropriate style is to tell the reader, “you must. ...” If we were not stating a legal requirement, but were instead just giving instructions, the appropriate style would be the imperative, “Fill out a ’prior notice’ form. ...’
Note that the original page was a news release. The Australia Post web site managers put it up exactly as it came from the U. S. Embassy. But we can ask whether, 4 years later, it must stay exactly as originally written. Why can’t we revise it to be a better explanation for people who need the information?
This is an example of how press releases live forever on web sites. I talk about this interesting issue in the Interlude on the New Life of Press Releases.
What do we learn from this case study?
Think about these points as you write your web content:
SUMMARIZING CHAPTER 8
Here are key messages from Chapter 8: