Foreword
I have to admit that when Ginny Redish first mentioned that she was thinking of doing a book about writing for the web, my first reaction was a sense of extreme personal relief.
For years, I’d really wanted to read a great book about writing for the web, and for years, one hadn’t appeared. There were some very good books about it, but not the book I was waiting for: the one that explained how writing for the web is really different, and why, and exactly what to do about it.
This missing book was starting to feel like one of those puzzling gaps in the fabric of the universe, like the fact that you never see any baby pigeons.1 And it was beginning to look like the only way I was ever going to get to read it was to write it myself. Which I really did not want to do, being by nature averse to both hard work and writing – and fond of my wife and being married to her.2
Knowing Ginny, I knew immediately that she would write the book I wanted to read, hence my relief.
I was also very happy to hear that she was taking it on, because I knew that a lot of people besides me really needed this book. After all,
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been puzzled that no one had written this book sooner, since it requires a sort of “perfect storm’:
Having this book – at long last – in my hands reminds me of the way Calvin Trillin once described a miracle-fabric parka his wife had given him that weighed nothing yet allowed him to stand comfortably in the freezing cold for hours: “I don’t know how much it cost, because it was a gift. But I have to think ... about a million dollars.’
If you have to do any writing for the web, the advice Ginny is giving here is, as they say in the commercials, priceless. In the years ahead, I’m certain it’s going to make the web a much better place to be.
1 While Googling to try to find out whether Holden Caulfield was really the first to raise the “Where are all the baby pigeons?” question, I came across a terrific answer: What you see are the babies. The adults are 12 feet tall and only come out at night.
2 Years ago, I wrote a tiny 4½-page chapter about writing for the web in Don’t Make Me Think! and it took me, literally, three solid weeks of 10-hour days. No kidding.
3 Come to think of it, a lot like the torture device in The Princess Bride. Especially for your loved ones, who over the years may have grown used to seeing you and talking to you and having you take out the trash occasionally.
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