Notes on the web style guide
A guide to get a sense of what others do, but limited in stylistic and composing advice because rhetorically too narrow.
Chap 9: Editorial Style is useful but full of uncritical assertions about reading and writing on the web.
- People read differently on the web, and a new writing genre designed to accommodate the reading habits of online users has emerged.
- Documents written to be read online should be concise and structured for scanning.
- One task in making sense of a document is determining which elements are related and which are not. Uniform connectedness defines groups of related information, frequently using “common regions,” in which elements are grouped within a bounding box or uniform background.
The trouble starts with this: A statement about chunking which needs to be taken back.
- Online writing is best presented using short segments of texts written in a clear, concise style and with ample use of editorial landmarks. This style supports the scanning style used by many web readers. But online prose does not have to be stripped down to a few headlines and bullet points to be effective: many readers will engage directly with longer written material online or print long articles to read offline.
Pinker on Conventions.. "Once you understand that prescriptive rules are conventions, most of the iptivist controversies evaporate. One such controversy springs from the commonplace among linguists that most nonstandard forms are in no way lazy, illogical, or inferior. The choice of isn’t over ain’t, dragged over drug, and can’t get any over can’t get no did not emerge from a weighing of their inherent merits, but from the historical accident that the first member of each pair was used in the dialect spoken around London when the written language became standardized. If history had unfolded differently, today’s correct forms could have been incorrect and vice-versa. "
