Writing online: Caught in the web
Lure readers into your website, and keep them there, with advice for writing compelling online copy from Tina Jackson
Digital writing skills are essential to the 21st-century writer. Think how often you use your phone, or tablet, or laptop, to look things up, read the news, find something out. Somebody wrote everything that you read.
I started as a print journalist early in the 1990s, writing features for magazines and eventually, newspapers. The internet barely existed, let alone iPhones. Everything I wrote was published in print. I’m still a journalist, and I still write for print – but more and more, I write for the web too, and the percentage of online to offline copy increases all the time. It’s the same for everyone else in the industry. You want to sell your words? Your chances of doing so are much greater digitally.
Reading online is not the same as reading in print, and writing online is not the same as writing for print. Learning how to do it isn’t rocket science, but like any commercial work, it’s about writing for the market – knowing what’s wanted, and providing it.
Let’s assume you’ve been commissioned to write copy – a news story, a feature article, maybe a blog post – for a website. Think, as a writer, how you read online, and what works for you. What makes you stay on a page? What makes you click through to something else? How will you make your web writing find its readers, and keep them? Read on, and find out.
How do digital readers differ from print readers?
Neuro-scientific research has led to the concept of the ‘bi-literate brain’ to describe the differences between reading in print (deep reading processes) and online (non-linear reading).
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