Short is Sweet for Web Copy Writing - Consider Your Audience
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Nielsen goes on to give a great example of this when he talks about the first draft of a summary he wrote of another column. The summary originally read “Yahoo Finance follows all 13 design guidelines for tab controls, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.” He noted that the summary was well-written, in the active voice, and a complete sentence as opposed to a fragment, but there way no way it would “perform its main job – to attract users who scan SERP listings.” Why? Because such users often only read the first two words – and these first two words would be meaningless to the folks Nielsen wanted to attract.
Nielsen didn’t want to attract people who are interested in Yahoo; he wanted to attract visitors who care about site and application design, who might, for instance, build GUI widgets. The rewritten summary, “13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization,” may be passive voice, but it puts the main topic of the article at the front – where a potentially interested searcher is most likely to see it.
There are other ways you can and should play to your target audience’s needs. All the way back in 1999, Nathan Wallace published an article about writing for many interest levels. He defined the levels of interest as follows:
• No interest
• Title only
• One sentence summary
• One paragraph summary
• Major points
• Minor points
• Detailed interest
• Thirst for more information
You serve the needs of readers at every level by making sure your writing is clear, concise, and on topic. At the very least, you let them not waste their time and yours when they can quickly determine they don’t have a deeper interest in your subject.
You start getting people who have some interest in reading what you have to say once they hit the one-paragraph summary. You should use this summary to “give people an insight into your information in a few short sentences…you are selling your information, not your article.” If your first paragraph is nothing more than a tease, many readers may not bother to go further. Let them know they’ll sink their teeth into something real if they read further, by giving them something real to start with.
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