Online Writing Skills

Every medium has their own style of writ­ing, one that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily work in any other medium.

Writ­ing for news­pa­pers has the well known “inverted pyra­mid” style that works well for that spe­cific medium, but does not work well for mag­a­zine arti­cles, or movie scripts.

Books have a dif­fer­ent writ­ing style that works well for them, but doesn’t work quite so well for copy­writ­ing or pub­lic relations.

The same holds true with writ­ing for online and other dig­i­tal media. There is a cer­tain style that works well in this envi­ron­ment and this style is based on the fol­low­ing three characteristics:

1. peo­ple tend to scan mate­r­ial posted to dig­i­tal media, they rarely read it word for word. Because of this scan­ning, there are ways of struc­tur­ing mate­r­ial that helps scan­ners locate impor­tant bits of information;
2. dig­i­tal media is inter­ac­tive. OK, so pretty much every­one knows that dig­i­tal media is inter­ac­tive, but know­ing this and tak­ing advan­tage of the poten­tial of inter­ac­tiv­ity are two very dif­fer­ent beasts. Based on what the full poten­tial of inter­ac­tiv­ity on the Inter­net can be, per­haps just hav­ing a spot on your pages or posts for com­ments isn’t going to be enough inter­ac­tiv­ity for your readers;
3. dig­i­tal media is mul­ti­me­dia capa­ble. Words are easy to use. We sit at our com­puter key­boards and type away, and very quickly and eas­ily, the infor­ma­tion that we are try­ing to get across is there for any­one to see, read and hope­fully, under­stand.  How­ever, step up to the next level of mul­ti­me­dia capa­bil­ity — dig­i­tal audio files, dig­i­tal pho­tos, dig­i­tal videos, pod­casts — and things start becom­ing more com­pli­cated for the author/writer, but more enjoy­able for the reader. And in this day and age when there are mil­lions and mil­lions of blogs and web­sites, that next level of mul­ti­me­dia capa­bil­ity can often put you miles ahead of your competitors.

The arti­cles below pro­vide dis­cus­sions, descrip­tions and some How-to infor­ma­tion to help you take advan­tage of these three char­ac­ter­is­tics of online and dig­i­tal media.

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Writ­ing Ele­gant and Effec­tive Online Con­tent:

.….1) How To Make Dig­i­tal Con­tent Scannable