How Your English Teachers Negatively Impacted Your Web Experience Today

There’s writing. And then there’s writing for the web. While the foundations of each share identical roots, it’s in the application where they differ. Unfortunately, too often we run into content that suffers from misalignment to the medium.

And for that, I blame English teachers.

Let me preface this by saying we at Northern have all the respect in the world for teachers and the job they do. But behaviours and mandates set during our high school English days have led to a wealth of bad writing — some of which is made exponentially worse by presenting that content online and misaligning to how people actually consume it.

On the web, you have skimmers, swimmers, and divers. The vast majority — I’ll conservatively estimate 85 percent — are people who are just scanning your content. They’re looking for visual anchors or key elements that draw the eye. They’re spending only seconds on your site, searching for relevancy to them.

And that’s the key. Relevancy to your reader; not to your marketing department, your senior leadership, or your organization’s President. Your readers and consumers want content that matters to them, delivered in a way they want to consume it.

There’s probably 10 percent of your audience that are swimmers — they’re willing to read a paragraph or two, they’re willing to invest a bit of time to search out relevancy if it’s not immediately available.

And maybe five percent are divers. You know them — they’re the terms and conditions readers.

Unfortunately, much of the web content — especially in the public service sector like higher education, hospitals, and government — is written for the latter group.

The thought is that if you put up all the potential text in one space, people will find it. But that’s not the case and you’re actively discouraging 95 percent of your audience by catering to two different groups: the divers and the author’s ego.

This is where those teachers come in.

Many of you will remember being tasked with a 1,000-word essay. The topic didn’t matter, but those 1,000 words were key. Why? Likely it was to prevent students from whipping off a 200-word essay and calling it a day. However, the unintended consequence is bloated content that’s largely too challenging to read, inaccessible, and buries the lead.

If you can write a cohesive, compelling “article” in 200 words, what do we do with the additional 800? Well, passive voice is a great way of making three words into 10. And how about empty phrases? Throw in a few “It goes without saying that…” or “for what it’s worth”s into the mix, and you’ll hit your artificial threshold quickly.

And that may work if you’re reading an essay (though we’d argue that point). But on the web? On your phone? When you’re consuming content quickly? Bloated language is a barrier to comprehension.

In our key client verticals, we regularly see that users are consuming maybe two to three pages and spending only a minute or two minutes looking for content. That passive-heavy, officious-sounding content may “sound smart,” but it actually negatively impacts the user’s experience. In turn, this can impact the user’s level of engagement with your content, and reduces its likelihood of leading to conversions that positively impact your business goals.

These issues are only magnified when we consider universal accessibility. From people for whom English isn’t their first or second language, to people with differing reading comprehension skills, to the vast majority of people who are simply skimming content looking for immediate comprehension and an understanding of what to do next, shorter, punchier, active content will better meet those needs.

Writing for the web can still use the principles of effective writing — whether that’s the inverted pyramid, the five Ws and an H, or a combination of all — but how they’re applied needs to be tailored for the web.

That means using information architecture to its fullest; that means creating visual breaks with headers and bullets; that means providing users access to high-level summaries or introductions, then offering them intuitive pathways to more comprehensive content.

At Northern, we offer a Writing for the Web seminar that shows how people consume content and how you can structure it effectively to benefit not just comprehension, but accessibility, search engine optimization, and mobile content presentation.

Because there’s a difference between “sounding smart” and “being smart.” There’s a difference between gratifying the writer’s ego and providing value to the end user in a way that aligns with what they need. And there’s a difference between adhering to structures that may work in print, and structuring content in a way that actually aligns with how people consume content on the web.

All those things your English teachers told you to do? Artificial word counts? Not starting sentences with “ands” or “buts”? Not splitting your infinitives or ending sentences with a preposition? Throw them all out the window.

Your goal is to create content that sounds like a human is speaking it, aligned to the ways humans actually speak. Your goal is to create content that aligns with long-tail search queries that generally are pretty casual in nature. Your goal is to write like people speak and read, so they can find what they need from you.

That’s the difference between “sounding smart” and “being smart.”

If you want help in that journey and are looking to create content that matters, please contact us for more information.