It finally dawned on me that the reason I haven’t embraced the guidelines, tips and tricks for writing to the web is that the definition is too narrow: “text on the internet must be brief, bulleted and scannable”. Of course this is true for webpages that rely on conveying information about products or services. I often get the feeling that text on webpages must be seen as solely written to gain or enhance traffic, turnover or rating. But there are so many webpages, where that is irrelevant – why should a weblog live up to criterias of scannability, when it’s main purpose is to describe aspects of the world that demand a more detailed description that a bullet-formatted list? In my view, there is a hazard that language and ultimately communication will suffer from the cries for short texts.
We need prose in the world! Good texts should be trimmed, concise and well structured – both on the web and in the real world.