Web Writing in the News

Keep up with the latest news on how people read online and how writing for the Web is changing.

 

March 13, 2009

Blogging Your Way into a Job, March 10, 2009, Forbes.com
Above all, keep your posts short, conversational and informal. And don’t click “Publish” without doing a spelling and grammar check. A blog riddled with errors will hurt you more than it will help.

 

February 19, 2009

Online Written Mistakes Increase, December 11, 2008, LousyWriter.com
In a search of business services websites last month; copywriting agency, The Writing Stable found, on average, thirteen spelling errors per 100 pages and 134 mistakes on every 1000 pages. Does this matter? Usability expert, Jakob Nielsen’s research states that reading from computer screens is 25% slower than in print; mistakes slow readers down further.

October 15, 2008

Informal Style of Electronic Messages Is Showing Up in Schoolwork, Study Finds. This article from The New York Times dates back to April of this year, but it’s enlightening to see how the informal writing of email, texting, social networks, and personal blogs affects the writing of today’s students. “About half said they sometimes omitted proper punctuation and capitalization in schoolwork. A quarter said they had used emoticons like smiley faces. About a third said they had used text shortcuts like ‘LOL’ for ‘laugh out loud.’”

 

August 26, 2008

On Copy Editing. Not strictly about writing for the Web, but still applicable. “We all need editors. When we write, we might know what we mean to say, and we become blind to the looseness in our language and the gaps in our facts. Friends will ignore slips in e-mails, but newspaper readers should be able to expect a higher standard.” From the Washington Post.

 

July 7, 2008

Merriam-Webster adds approximately 100 words to dictionary. “John Morse, Merriam-Webster’s president and publisher, said the cleverness of many Web-related terms makes them easy to grasp and gives them staying power. Webinar (an online meeting) is new, along with netroots (political grassroots activists who communicate online, especially in blogs).

“There’s a kind of collective genius on the part of the people developing this technology, using vocabulary that is immediately accessible to all of us,” he said. “It’s sometimes absolutely poetic.”

 

June 27, 2008

Facebook to users: Let’s cut grammatical errors. “The online hangout Facebook is getting more serious about grammar. No more should users see jarringly incorrect declarations such as ‘Debbie changed their profile picture.’”