10
Tuning up Your Sentences
,Now, let’s work on writing the paragraphs, sentences, and words of your web content.
Lists and tables – other good ways to tune up your sentences – next chapter
As part of your content strategy, you must decide on the tone, voice, and style for your web messages, always remembering the key message of this book: content = conversation.
Writing conversationally is not “dumbing down”
Language changes over time. It always has. Our expectations of appropriate style also change over time. They always have.
Over the past century, the style for communicating useful information has become much less formal. And that trend has accelerated greatly with the Internet and social media.
Writing conversationally in plain language with short sentences and short words is not dumbing down. It’s communicating clearly. It’s respecting your busy site visitors’ time.
Write so that busy people understand what you are saying the first time they read it.
As you write:
• Picture the people you are talking with. Which persona(s) are you conversing with?
• Get into a conversation with those personas. If you were on the phone (speaking or texting), what would they ask you about this topic?
• Reply to them as if you were speaking or texting with them.
Keep photos and short descriptions of your personas with you as you write. Let them join your family on your desk, your corkboard, or a corner of your screen.
Ten Guidelines for Tuning up Your Sentences
1 Talk to your site visitors – Use “you”
Converse. Make the information inviting and personal by addressing your site visitors directly, as Etsy.com does in Figure 10-1.
Figure 10-1 Etsy.com wants to attract artisans to sell their craft pieces through the site. The friendly writing and pictures make the site inviting.
Use the imperative in instructions
If you are giving hints or tips or instructions, use the imperative (List, Get, Ship from the example in Figure 10-1). That’s a “you” form without stating “you.” When you write with imperatives you are talking directly to your site visitor. You are conversing. Figure 10-2 shows a list of imperatives in tips about finding the right house to buy.
Figure 10-2 These tips are easy to scan, read, and remember because they each start with a short, plain, imperative verb.
Use “you” throughout
If you can address your site visitors directly, do so – and do so throughout the content that is meant for them.
In Case Study 10-1, the writer talks directly to the site visitor with the imperative verb “ask” but never uses the pronoun “you.” Why not? If the writer talked to “you,” the doctor, the content would be both more understandable and more engaging.
Case Study 10-1 Addressing the Reader Directly
Consider this excerpt. It’s for doctors who are considering moving to a different state where they will have to get a new state license to practice medicine. It’s the first few sentences of a web paragraph that goes on for more than 200 words.
Could we improve this?
I think so.
Consider the situation
Let’s start with our three planning questions:
• What does the writer want to achieve?
• Who is the primary persona? With whom is the writer conversing?
– Medical doctor – very smart, knows a lot, but also is very busy, dealing with many things related to the move, doesn’t want to spend a lot of time reading about this topic.
• What’s the conversation? What does the doctor want to know?
Use “you” to be gender-neutral
In English, the third-person singular pronouns (he, she, him, her, his, hers) are gender-specific. When you use these pronouns, some site visitors 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.
Figure 10-3 is a paragraph from the current version of an example that I used in the first edition. The topic is mailing a package of food from Australia to the United States. In some cases, the sender has to tell the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about the package before mailing it.
The writers for the Australian Post Office have made some of the changes I recommended in the first edition of Letting Go of the Words, but not others. And now a key sentence has a gender-specific pronoun where it should not. We could easily avoid the gender-specific pronoun by talking directly to people, as I do in Figure 10-4.
Figure 10-4 My suggested revision
If you use a noun like “employee” or “customer,” you may have a problem referring to that person later in the sentence or paragraph. Workarounds like combining the two genders into “s/he” or “he or she” are awkward. The blue box, “More on gender-neutral writing,” gives you several ways to avoid the problem.
More on gender-neutral writing
Four techniques for removing gender from your pronouns:
The customer may return any item she is not satisfied with.
You may return any item you are not satisfied with.
If you are not satisfied with any item, you may return it.
A contractor must renew his insurance every year.
Contractors must renew their insurance every year.
• Turn a noun phrase into a verb phrase.
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.
You must apply at least two weeks before classes start.
• Use “a,” “an,” or “the” instead of a pronoun.
Use appropriate gender for specific people
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 10-5 is the beginning of a news story about an unusual female athlete.
Figure 10-5 If you are talking about a particular person, use the appropriate pronouns.
Converse directly even for serious messages
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. Figure 10-6 is from a government regulation.
Figure 10-6 Personal pronouns work well even in legal documents.
http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov (Title 13, Part 123)
More on clear legal writing online – Interlude 4 after Chapter 11
2 Use “I” and “we”
Did you notice the pronoun “I” in the question heading of Figure 10-6? That’s the voice of the site visitor.
Look back at Chapter 9, “Including Useful Headings,” for more examples of headings with pronouns.
“I,” “you,” and “we” all work well in web writing.
Be consistent in how you use “I,” “you,” and “we”
Web writers often ask me how to use these three pronouns when writing questions and answers. Whose voice should come where?
You can set your style in either of two ways:
When the site visitor asks the question
I suggest using
• “I” and “my” in the question (the voice of the site visitor)
• “you” and “your” in the answer (the site is talking to the site visitor)
• “we” and “our” for the organization that is answering the question
The British charity, Shelter, uses this technique (Figure 10-7).
Figure 10-7 You can picture the people conversing through this web content.
When the site asks the question
This often happens in forms.
I suggest using
• “you” and “your” in the question (the site asking the site visitor)
• “I” and “my” in the answer (the voice of the site visitor)
• “we” and “our” for the organization that is asking the question
Amazon.com does this well (Figure 10-8).
Figure 10-8 In forms, the question might have “you” and the label might have “I” and “my.”
In blogs and social media, “I” is fine
If you don’t use “I” for the voice of the site visitor, you can use it for yourself. When you use pronouns, you remind your site visitors that they are conversing with a person.
Figure 10-9 is a Tunisian blogger’s admiration for local craft work.
For your own work, “I” is fine
You may be the sole author of an article or opinion piece or a story, even if it is not a blog. You may be an author or consultant with your own web site. Make the story or site be your voice. Converse with your site visitors as fantasy writer Allan Frewin Jones does (Figure 10-10).
For an organization, use “we”
“We,” “us,” “our” are best when you are writing on behalf of a group – your team, your division, your organization. It’s what you would say in a conversation. Most web sites do this at least on the Contact Us page.
Sometimes, it’s not about “I,” “you,” and “we”
You may be talking about objects, situations, or people other than your site visitors. In that case, it’s okay to use the appropriate nouns. You can still keep the sentences short and active and follow the other guidelines in this chapter as in this example about butterflies.
3 Write in the active voice (most of the time)
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 order for English sentences. Active sentences help people grab information quickly and easily.
Sentences in the passive voice (passive sentences) start with the object that is acted on instead of the actor. They either put the actor after the verb in a “by …” phrase or they leave the actor out entirely.
For this guideline, I’ve said “most of the time.” Sometimes, the passive is appropriate. Sometimes, the focus belongs on the object. Sometimes, it really does not matter who is responsible for doing the action. You may need the passive to avoid blaming or scaring your site visitors.
However, an entire web page in the passive is boring and difficult to understand. It’s not conversational. Eyes glaze over. People leave. Or they misinterpret the information.
A “think aloud” study showed this clearly: The study used sections of a government regulation. The people in the study were from the real audience for that regulation.
Flower, Hayes, and Swarts, “The Scenario Principle”
When these people tried to make sense of the regulation, they didn’t just shorten sentences and shorten words. They told themselves stories! They turned the original writing (long, passive sentences with no pronouns) into active sentences with actors and action verbs.
That’s a lot of mental work! No wonder people give up quickly on hard-to-read content. And, even worse, the readers misinterpreted many of the passive sentences. Their translations were wrong.
Don’t risk people leaving. Don’t risk people misunderstanding. Write active sentences with actors and action verbs.
Case study 10-2 shows how to make writing much clearer by turning passive sentences into active ones so that “you” the reader know what to do.
Case Study 10-2 Writing in the active voice
Do you agree with my comments on this web content?
Now, consider the planning questions for this web content:
– Get the right supplies to people who need them.
– Not be bothered with questions or phone calls.
– Have people fill out the form correctly.
• Persona: People in the organization who need supplies.
– Want to get through this task quickly
– Don’t want to mess up; don’t want the hassle of getting the wrong stuff
When we consider purposes, persona, and conversation, we can see that these instructions are likely to fail. People will call the buyer or disturb the buyer in person with questions. Or people will fill out the form incorrectly, and the buyer will have to converse again, in email or in person, before actually ordering the supplies.
In most situations, people get 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.
Would this be better?
My suggested revision
4 Write short, simple sentences
Your busy site visitors have no time to untangle your text. Try to keep your sentences to about 10 to 20 words. Cut the fluff. Say it once clearly. Keep each sentence to one thought – or two tightly connected thoughts.
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.
Writing very short messages in social media
Twitter limits us to 140 characters. SMS allows us only 20 more than that. Texting on a smart phone or other mobile device can stress our thumbs. And so we tend to abbreviate, write telegraphically, drop some grammar rules.
That’s fine as long as you (the sender) and the people whom you want to get the message understand what you are writing and consider the style appropriate for the medium. Your content strategy should include decisions about abbreviations and telegraphic writing – when it’s okay; when it isn’t. You may decide that writing Thx c u soon is fine in tweets, SMS, Facebook, Google+, and other social media – but that it is not okay in regular web content for a general audience.
If you are part of an organization, remember your brand. The voice of the brand may change slightly in different media, but that may not be your individual decision. It’s part of the organization’s content strategy.
Fragments may also work
The personality, tone, and style of your site may make sentence fragments acceptable to your site visitors even in regular web content. Consider the description of a blog in Figure 10-11. The fragments work well here.
Finding your voice and style
Clear, simple writing need not be monotonous. Writing can have character and flavor and still be clear. Part of your content strategy should be to understand the personality you want your site to portray: formal, informal, irreverent, funny, serious, and so on. Then match your writing style to that personality.
For example, the layout, design choices, typography, and writing style of the Dot’s Diner site all show the down-home personality of these friendly Louisiana diners. Wouldn’t you stop by next time you want a late-night meal?
We can all think of sites where the same choices would not be appropriate. But no matter how formal and technical your site’s personality is, you can still write clearly – with personal pronouns, active voice, short sentences, words your site visitors know. You can still write conversationally!
On deciding the personality you want to come through your messages – Bloomstein, Content Strategy at Work, 2012
Busy site visitors always need clear writing
The guidelines in this chapter apply to legal, scientific, and technical writing just as much as they do to personal sites, e-commerce, and nonprofits. In fact, the more complex the topic, the more you need to be sure that you are writing in a clear, coherent style so that your site visitors understand your key messages.
Figure 10-12 shows how the writers at the Mayo Clinic use short, active sentences with vivid word pictures to explain stress.
5 Cut unnecessary words
Sometimes, sentences are longer than necessary because the writer uses several words where one (or none) will do.
As I suggest in Chapter 14 on moving from first draft to final copy, don’t let your first draft be your final draft. Read what you wrote and see where you can cut it. Let it rest – for a few minutes, an hour, a day. When you read it again, see what more you can cut while making your meaning clearer and sharper.
6 Give extra information its own place
In English, once we see the actor or object that starts the sentence, we look for the verb. We expect the grammatical subject and the verb to be near each other. If extra information takes us off on a tangent, we may lose track of what the sentence is about. When the extra information ends and we are back in the main sentence, we may get back on the main track – and then forget the extra information.
Don’t put extra stuff between the grammatical subject and the verb. Don’t put extra stuff between the verb and the grammatical object.
Case Study 10-3 shows you both how tangled a sentence can get and how to untangle it.
Case Study 10-3 Untangling a convoluted sentence
Is the first sentence of this excerpt as easy as it could be?
Finding the underlying sentence
Let’s untangle the stuffed sentence by finding the subject, verb, and object of the main clause.
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.
Thinking “personas, conversations”
The revised sentence also matches the order in which site visitors need the information: key message first, then answers to people’s questions in the order they would ask them.
Learning from this case study
A sentence with many commas probably has extra information stuffed into it. To untangle sentences like this one:
• Think of your site visitors, the questions they would ask, and the order in which they would ask them.
• If people need different pieces of information at different times, separate those pieces.
• Keep the main parts of the sentence together (subject – verb – object).
• Pull out extra information and make each piece its own sentence (or fragment).
• Consider using visuals, fragments, and lists where they convey the information quickly and accurately.
7 Keep paragraphs short
For school essays, reports, and stories, you probably had to write at least three sentences, and more likely five or six sentences, in each paragraph. That’s too long for the web – and certainly for anything people are going to read on a mobile device.
A one-sentence paragraph is fine
Keep your web paragraphs very short. Look at how short most paragraphs are on news sites (Figure 10-13).
Figure 10-13 Online, paragraphs with one short sentence make a news article easy to read.
www.telegraph.co.uk, by Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Lists or tables may be even better
In many cases, you can take information out of sentences and make it more scannable through lists or tables. I’ll show you how to do that in the next chapter. Before we get there, however, let’s consider the last 3 of our 10 guidelines for tuning up your sentences.
8 Start with the context
Start each paragraph with a topic sentence – a sentence that sets the context, that tells readers what the paragraph is about.
Checking your topic sentences
You can use this technique to know if you have good topic sentences:
Even within a sentence, 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.
For a fascinating study showing that people don’t wait for the context, see Dixon, 1987.
Case Study 10-4 shows how the context is often in the wrong place.
Case Study 10-4 Starting with the context – the topic
Is the following paragraph instantly clear?
Slightly simplified from a U.S. Department of Agriculture regulation
If you were talking to someone and this was the information you had to tell them, what part of the sentence would you say first? What would come next? How would you break up the information?
Reversing the order
When telling this information to someone, you would probably reverse the order. You would start with the yams because that’s the answer to “What are we talking about?”
The yams are the context, the topic, the connection to what the person you’re in this conversation with came to find out about. The yams belong at the beginning – whether you are telling someone this out loud or in writing.
Simplifying even further
Once you’ve untangled a complex sentence, you will often see other problems to attend to.
In the “yams” example, the original only talked about “fumigation.” It didn’t say who was responsible for fumigating the yams. So, in my first try at writing more clearly, I put it in the passive.
But you know that active is better. Also, our importer is going to want to know who does the fumigating.
Sometimes, to write clearly, you have to find out more information than you originally had.
Also, we may not have to put all those technical words into the second sentence. If an “approved fumigator” has to do the procedure, that’s the person who needs to know about “methyl bromide” at “normal atmospheric pressure.” So, it might be better to wait and put that information into the procedure.
We might let go of more words and write this:
Learning from this case study
Once again, we see how focusing on your site visitors helps you write well for the web.
• Think about what your site visitors do and do not know.
• Start with what they know. Then introduce new information.
• Consider using the pattern, “if, then.” It follows the reader’s logic and makes you put first things first, second things second. (You almost always need the “if” in the “if clause,” but you don’t actually need to write the word “then” in the “then clause.” For example, write “If it’s raining, take an umbrella.”)
• Hear the conversation. You don’t have to put in a heading for every question the site visitor would ask. But if you listen in your head for what someone would ask after reading each bit of what you write, you’ll convey the content in logical order for your site visitors.
The principle of “context, topic, known” before “new” is sometimes also called “given-new.” It’s based on linguistic research about how people converse. (Clark and Haviland, “Comprehension and the Given-New Contract”)
9 Put the action in the verb
Much of the web is about action. Verbs are action words.
If you bury the action in a noun, you often end up with just a form of “to be” (is, are, was, were) instead of an action verb. Weak. Boring. Uninteresting placeholder.
This table gives you the most common endings for nouns that hide verbs. Use the table to help you move the action out of nouns and put the action where it belongs – in the verb.
| Look for this | As in this example | Which should be this verb |
| -al | denial | deny |
| -ance | maintenance | maintain, keep |
| -ence | concurrence | concur, agree |
| -ment | assignment | assign |
| -sion | transmission | transmit, send |
| -tion | recommendation | recommend |
| -ure | failure | fail, if you don’t |
After you find the verb that’s hidden in the noun, see if you can replace it with a shorter, stronger, plainer verb. You can often do that, as in
10 Use your site visitors’ words
Remember you are conversing with your site visitors. Make that the heart of your content strategy on every level. Keep it in mind when you decide what topics to write about and what to say for each topic. Think conversation as you construct paragraphs, sentences, lists, and tables. And when you choose words.
Write for your site visitors
You may be saying, “We have special words that have specific meaning in our field. We have to use them.” If everyone you are conversing with shares your special language, it’s fine to use those words.
As Sarah Bauer asked when she used the example in Figure 10-14 from lululemon.com, “How many non-yoga participants know what ‘downward-dog’ means?”
Figure 10-14 Using special words your site visitors know can appeal to your market.
Bauer, It Works For “You”: A User-Centric Guideline To Product Pages, Smashing Magazine, January 10, 2012
Lululemon makes clothes for yoga. It knows its site visitors. It appeals to them with their vocabulary (as well as with features of its clothes, like an emergency hair tie on the hoodie’s zipper).
Know your site visitors
The examples Bauer used in her blog article were of companies that had done the research to understand their site visitors – to know the words their site visitors use when searching, when buying in other channels, when talking about the topics of the site.
I see the opposite happen: Writers greatly overestimating how much of their company’s internal jargon others know.
Your site visitors may not know words that are commonplace to you. Research shows that people who know a special vocabulary overestimate others’ knowledge of those words by about 25% to 30%.
Lydia Hooke showed this for a government regulation in the 1970s. More recently, see Hayes and Bayzek, 2008.
• A lawyer in one specialty may not know the words that are common in another specialty. And people coming to the web for information about wills or leases are probably not lawyers.
• A doctor in one specialty may not know the words that are common in another specialty. And many health care workers are not doctors. Most patients are not doctors.
• Your site visitors may come from all over the world. Many are not native speakers of the language of your site.
• Even in your country, your site visitors may include many people who are there temporarily or new to the country. They may not be fluent in your site’s language.
You should offer your content in many languages and in culturally appropriate ways for your diverse site visitors. Localizing web sites and apps is an important topic, but it is beyond the scope of this book.
And always use plain language
Lots of words aren’t technical terms or specific words that will help market to your site visitors. They’re just big words that take everyone longer to read and understand.
You can often find a short, simple word that makes your content more conversational. Try it. Start with my list and add your own examples of long, less-common words that you can replace with short, simple words.
| Instead of this | Try this |
| ascertain | find out |
| attempt | try |
| compensation | pay |
| component | part |
| inception | start |
| initiate | begin |
| inquire | ask |
| obtain | get |
| prior to | before |
| purchase | buy |
| request | ask for |
| subsequent | next |
| terminate | end |
| utilize | use |
As I said at the beginning of the chapter, using these short, simple words is not “dumbing down” your content. It’s respecting your busy site visitors’ time.
And here’s the research that supports this point: Plain language helps both low-literacy and high-literacy site visitors.
Kathryn Summers and her team worked on a web site for a medicine that millions of people take. They tested the web site with both low-literacy and high-literacy web users. They then revised the site to resolve the problems the low-literacy web users had.
(Those problems were not only the words. Summers and her team also used many of the other guidelines for good web writing. They reorganized into a clear, logical, flowing story. They shortened paragraphs and sentences. They turned paragraphs into bulleted lists. And they always used the shortest, simplest, plainest word that had the right meaning.)
Then they tested the new site with both low-literacy and high-literacy web users.
Conclusion: As you see in the tables in Figure 10-15, the plain language changes helped low-literacy site visitors get what they needed faster and more accurately. And those same changes helped high-literacy site visitors even more!!
Figure 10-15 Revising by following plain language guidelines improved this web site for both low-literacy and high-literacy web users.
High-literacy readers are likely to be the busiest and least patient of your site visitors. Respect their time by using plain language.
Summarizing Chapter 10
Key messages from Chapter 10:
• Writing informally is not “dumbing down”!
• Talk to your site visitors – use “you.”
– Use the imperative in instructions.
– Use “you” to be gender-neutral.
– Use appropriate gender for specific people.
– Converse directly even for serious messages.
– In blogs and social media, “I” is fine.
– For your own articles, “I” is fine.
– When you write for an organization, use “we.”
– Be consistent in how you use “I,” “you,” and “we.”
• Write in the active voice (most of the time).
• Write simple, short, straightforward sentences.
– Very short sentences are okay, too.
– Busy site visitors always need clear writing.
• Give extra information its own place.
– A one-sentence paragraph is fine.
– Lists or tables may be even better.
• Put the action in the verbs.
• Use your site visitors’ words.
– Write for your site visitors.
– And always use plain language.
• Research shows that using these guidelines for clear writing for the web helps both low-literacy and high-literacy site visitors.