Dan B. replied to a recent email with a friendly note that ended by suggesting that I help readers skim my articles by using typography to flag the most important ideas. Dan is one of the computing industry’s Good Guys: brilliant, thoughtful, innovative, ethical, human. And I’m not saying this just because he gave this blog a nice plug in his own weblog. Really. But, this is not the first time Dan has stared at the endless, gray cliffs of my verbiage and begged for a handhold. I’m not relenting.

I think Dan’s advice is good. It certainly works for Dan. He puts key ideas in bold and generally keeps his entries short. Trellix – Dan’s company’s product – is well set up to help authors do so. But he and I seem to be writing weblogs for different reasons. Dan’s interest in making his writing skimmable indicates, I assume, that he sees his writing as a way of conveying information. The reader wants to take in that information as efficiently as possible and thus benefits from font variations that pull the eye towards the key points. I, unfortunately, have no information to convey. I want to draw readers in and pull them through. I suffer from author’s arrogance; Dan is far more considerate of his readers.

Or perhaps it comes down to something simpler and less interesting: Dan’s use of typography helps readers find what they want to read in depth. I happen to write in longer chunks, so I use headlines and opening paragraphs to let the reader make a go-no-go decision. Once a reader is in, my job is to entice the reader all the way to the end. Eruptions of boldface makes that job harder.

Dan isn’t suggesting that Anna Karenina could have been improved by the judicious use of bold face. The issue is the nature of weblogs. Purveyor of information? Writing that generates interest in what otherwise would go unnoticed? Or something else? There’s no one answer to this.

Believe me, If I had salient points to make, I’d make them in boldface. But my aim is not to make it easier for readers to get the information they need and get going, but to pull them through … best of all, against their will.

Note to e-merchants: If you want to make your sites “sticky,” write better.

Some links:

Dan on skimming
Dan’s site on writing well for the Web
Jakob Nielsen on writing for the Web

Oddly, the comments board for this entry has gotten filled with links to pornographic anime. I have deleted them. Weird.

Categories: Uncategorized dw