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A List Apart: Articles: 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web

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Saved by 19 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-08-30


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Daypop’s Dan Chan calls this the Living Web, the part of the web that is always changing.

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Writing for the Living Web is a tremendous challenge.

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Write for a reason, and know why you write. Whether your daily updates concern your work life, your hobbies, or your innermost feelings, write passionately about things that matter.

To an artist, the smallest grace note and the tiniest flourish may be matters of great importance. Show us the details, teach us why they matter. People are fascinated by detail and enthralled by passion; explain to us why it matters to you, and no detail is too small, no technical question too arcane.

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If you don’t really care, don’t write.

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If your site belongs to a product, a project, or an enterprise, you must still find a way to represent its passion and excitement.

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Write honestly. Don’t hide, and don’t stop short.

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If you are writing for the Living Web, you must write consistently. You need not write constantly, and you need not write long, but you must write often. One afternoon in grad school, I heard B. F. Skinner remark that fifteen minutes a day, every day, adds up to about book every year, which he suggested was as much writing as anyone should indulge. You don’t need to write much, but you must write, and write often.

If you don’t write for a few days, you are unfaithful to the readers who come to visit.

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If you cannot write for a time, and the reason for your absence is interesting, write about it.

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Since you write often, use good tools. Select them to fit your hand and voice. Learn to use them well.

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Write tight

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Read widely and well, on the web and off, and in your web writing take special care to acknowledge the good work and good ideas of other writers.

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Be generous with links. Be generous, too, with your time and effort; A-list sites may not need your traffic, but everyone can use a hand.

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Make good friends

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Find good enemies

Readers love controversy and learn from debate. Disagreement is exciting. Everyone loves a fight, and by witnessing the contest of competing ideas we can better understand what they imply.

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When beginning a debate, always have in mind a plan for ending it.

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The Living Web unfolds in time, and as we see each daily revelation we experience its growth as a story. Your arguments and rivalries, your ideas and your passions: all of these grow and shift in time, and these changes become the dramatic arc of your website.

Understand the storyteller’s art and use the technique of narrative to shape the emerging structure of your living site. Foreshadowing hints at future events and expected interests: your vacation, the election campaign, the endless midnight hours at work in the days before the new product ships. Surprise, an unexpected flash of humor or a sudden change of direction, refreshes and delights. Use links within your work to build depth, for today’s update will someday be your own back story.

People are endlessly fascinating. Write about them with care and feeling and precision. Invented characters, long a staple of newspaper columnists, are rarely seen on the Living Web; creating a fascinating (but imaginary) friend could balance your own character on your site.

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Interweave topics and find ways to vary your pacing and tone. Piling tension on tension, anger on rage, is ultimately self-defeating; sooner or later, the writing will demand more from you than you can give and the whole edifice will collapse in boredom or farce. When one topic, however important, overshadows everything else in your site, stop. Change the subject; go somewhere new, if only for a moment. When you return, you and your reader will be fresher and better prepared.

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If you know your facts and have done your homework, you have a right to your opinion. State it clearly. Never waffle, whine, or weasel.

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Topical archives are Google’s natural friend. Remember that your old pages will often be read by visitors from search engines; introduce yourself on every page, and be sure that every page, however obscure, has links to tell people:

  • who you are, what you want, and why you’re writing
  • your email address
  • where to find your latest writing

Link to work you’ve already written – especially to good work that you wrote long ago. Don’t be shy about linking to yourself: linking to your own work is a service, not self-promotion

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Do let your work on the Living Web flow from your passion and your play, your work life and your life at home. Establish a rhythm, so your writing comes naturally and your readers experience it as a natural part of their day or their week. But if the rhythm grows onerous, if you find yourself dreading your next update or resenting the demands of your readers, if you no longer relish your morning web routine or your evening note-taking, find a new rhythm or try something else. Change the schedule, or voice, or tone. Switch topics. Try, if you can, to resist the temptation to drop things entirely, to simply stop.

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