 Hi everybody I'm going to be talking today about how to write for the online medium. So how many people in the room are content writers? Okay all right so probably there'll be quite a bit of this stuff that you know or have learned in the past. Hopefully there might be one or two things that you'd maybe forgotten about and hadn't been sort of present and in the top of your mind or even one or two new things and for the rest of you in the room hopefully there'll be lots of new things to learn from this session. So I do have quite a lot of content in my content session but so I'll be moving quite quickly but at the end there'll be time for questions and I'm always valuable after the session finishes as well. So a little bit about me. I'm a corporate writer with an online specialization. I've also done a lot of work as a trainer so teaching people how to write, running sessions like this one but more focused on you know helping to people improve their writing. I've also done a lot of training in corporate writing but also in creative writing which I'll talk about in a little bit because in a past life I'm also an author and so I've got a PhD in writing. There's some of my book covers. Just to add a bit of colour. So today we're going to look at some information about online users and then we're going to look at how to write for scanning readers and go through a few of the specific things that you can do to help people who are scanning the page. And then finally we'll do a very quick overview on what writing for accessibility looks like. How to build that into your content writing. So first of all I always like to ask this question. What makes a good writer? Is it talent or skill? What do you guys think? Talent or skill? Yeah? I think it's like a skill you can learn. Skill you can learn? Yep. Anyone else? Everyone's a bit quiet. Sometimes some people say 50-50. I even ask this when I teach my creative writing tasks and of course perhaps not surprisingly when you're teaching a creative writing class people will always say oh it's 90% creativity. But in reality it is a skill that we learn, improve and that is why people can become writers and improve their writing and often even when people say so-and-so such a talented writer naturally it may be that they have read more books and so they're unconsciously taking the note of the way good writing looks or that they had a really good English teacher. So often even when we think it's talent it can actually be about a skill as well. So let's have a look at some information about online users. So how do people read online? So there's actually quite a lot of research which a lot of you may be across particularly the content writers in the room on online reading behaviors. The Nielsen Norman group are leading the way and I've been without giving more my age been in this for quite some time and even back in when I started in online writing was 1999 and even then Nielsen had already produced a lot of research around how people read and the best way to write for online users. But a more recent one is how people read online the eye-tracking evidence. Has anyone read this or seen this? Yeah it's quite an interesting one so something you might want to look at. I'm going to give you some of the information from here but it's something you might want to look at purchasing and reading some more. It's quite a detailed little report. So one of the first things or one of the main lessons is users scan content. Now that's probably not an earth-shattering revelation except that what is important is to think about that when you're writing your content whether you're maybe a Drupal developer in here and you're writing your own blogs or want to get into writing some blogs or whether you're one of our professional content writers in the room. So it's good to always keep that front of mind that people are going to be scanning the content you are writing. So you need to write for scanning readers. So before we look at how you can write for scanning readers I want to just provide a little bit more information about scanning because that eye-tracking evidence from the Nielsen and Norman group has actually shown a few patterns but the three main patterns that they were able to observe by looking at where people, by tracking people's eyes, literally tracking their eyes and where their eyes were going on the screen they were able to identify three really common patterns. The first one is the F pattern. So you can see here the user is, there's a bit of an F there, Taylor's down there so the person is reading almost all of the first paragraph and then they're starting to scan with a preference to the left a little bit. So you can see that's the F pattern. The other common pattern that people use is the layer cake pattern. This is where people scan the subheadings. So often they're actually scanning subheadings to find the information that's going to be relevant to them, all that they're looking for. And the other most common pattern is the spotted pattern where people are drawn to different things, might be headings, it might be keywords, it might be hyperlinks, bolded words, all those things that draw the user's eyes to that particular word or that particular section of the page. So who reckons they might use the F pattern when they're reading? No one? What about the layer cake pattern? Yeah, I think that I probably used that one. I use the F pattern a bit. What about the spotted pattern? Does anyone feel they're kind of scanning completely? Yep. And the reality is I think a few of you put up your hands more than once. So often we may be using a combination of all these three patterns when we're reading content online. So now let's go and say, well, what does that mean in terms of writing? How are we going to write to address these different patterns? So writing for scanning. So the four key ways we can write for scanning is to have clear and concise headings and subheadings, place important information upfront, using some different formatting techniques, which we're going to talk about as well, and using plain language and keeping content clean, clear and concise. So I'm going to talk about each of one of these in a little bit more detail. So let's first look at clear and concise subheadings. So it obviously helps scanning readers. We can see that just from that layer cake pattern that probably with some majority of people put their hand up for that layer cake. So if you've got some really well written, clear and concise headings and subheadings and a lot of them not like crazy, but you know, quite a few so you're really breaking up that content into those headings and subheadings, you're going to be helping the readers that are scanning. The other thing is it does it creates a lot more white space, which is much more inviting. If you're shown a wall of text, whether it be in an email or even a letter that comes in the mail to you, or an online document or an online web page, you're obviously going to be much more liable to dive into it if there's a bit of white space than just this wall of text. Clear and concise headings and subheadings should summarise the content in that section. Again, think about that layer cake pattern that we just talked about. If you're scanning the subheadings to decide if that section is relevant to you, it's really important that that subheading actually has the information about what the person's going to find in that paragraph in that section. Ideally, four to six words long, sometimes hard depending on the topic we're writing about, but if you always aim for that, if you're one or two words over, you're going to be in a better place than having a subheading that's two or three lines long. And also keywords at the start. So if you can, and this helps with SEO as well, search engine optimisation. If you can, try and have your keywords at the start. Sometimes it can be handy to have a question. So what is and then whatever it is that you might be talking about, and in that case the keywords at the end of the subheading. But if you're not asking questions in that sort of way, then try and front load it so your keywords are at the start. And that again, thinking about that F pattern in terms of the gaze pattern we saw, that helps people who are scanning with a combination of the F pattern where they're looking at the starts of words and the starts of the headings, and also using a bit of the layer cake where they're looking at the subheadings and headings. So here's some examples here. So if we have a look here, we've got a subheading here with quite a short little paragraph, another subheading here with a short paragraph and some bullet points. And again on this one on the left you can see the use of some headings and subheadings there as well. So we're not having a huge amount of information. You can see this idea of the white space to make it a more inviting page to the reader, rather than as I said that wall of text. So these are sorts of things that you're looking for in your own writing and also when you're looking at other web pages, I'm sure that if you're looking at these sorts of web pages that have a lot of subheadings and other ways that we chunk content, that you're going to be much more drawn into it and able to get the information you need out of it much more easily. So if we go back to these four ways, we've just covered clear and concise headings, now let's have a look at placing important information up front. So in terms of going back to this Nielsen and Norman research, this is some really, really good facts for us to know, some nice stats. I always like a few good stats. 81% of users looked at the first paragraph. So again remember this is the eye tracking where they're actually looking at where the person is looking. So 81% looked at the first paragraph, that's pretty good. 71% of users looked at the second paragraph. 63% of users looked at the third paragraph. So already by the time we get to the third paragraph we're getting a big, well not a big drop, but we're starting to get a drop from that 81 to that 63. But the most significant drop as you'll see is from the third to the fourth paragraph. So what does that look like as a visual? Looks something like this on the right here. So you have a lot of concentrated focus on the first paragraph, a bit less, a bit less, and then a lot less again. So that's again very important for us to be mindful of this research and this pattern of behavior for online users when we're writing. So I know the writers in the room would have heard of this, but we'll do it anyway. Who's heard of the inverted pyramid structure? Okay and the other people in the room are going, what are they talking about? So the inverted pyramid structure, it includes a summary or the most important information at the top of the page. So basically it's you have the essential information or a summary, important information and a background information. It was probably first used and has been used for a long time now in newspaper writing. So if you pick up a newspaper, whether it's a physical one or an online newspaper, you'll probably notice by the time you read the heading and the first paragraph, you've got a pretty good idea of the story. It goes back to that kind of who, what, where, how and then sometimes the why might be buried a bit deeper. But just to present that really important information upfront in your first paragraph. For websites, what you might actually see happening is having a little summary at the top here and this is what the Nielsen Norman Group website does as well. And so you actually include, so in the example on the right, this is about the New South Wales Companion card and you've got a summary information. So at the very least, if the readers only read that page and that, sorry, I only read that first part of that page, they have an idea of what the content is going to be and it also helps them if they're scanning to know if they want to read the rest of that page, if they need to find another page. Perhaps they've discovered they haven't actually come to the right place. Okay, if we go back to our list again, we've covered the first two. The next one is formatting techniques. There's quite a few different things we can do with formatting techniques. Who was in Diana's presentation earlier today about plain language? Yep, me. So there's actually a bit of crossover as you're about to see as we go into some of these techniques here. Okay, so formatting techniques help scanning, that helps scanning include headings and subheadings. So we've already covered that but as I said when we were looking at it, it really does help the scanning reader. It invites them in, it creates a wide space. They can scan just the headings and subheadings, get an idea of your content. Short paragraphs also really, really important. They create wide space but they also allow the reader to get the most important information quite quickly. Bullet points and numbered lists that naturally draw the reader's attention. Again, there was a brief mention in this morning's presentation about using bullet points and then the next one is designs or page layouts that are broken into chunks and this was probably what Diana's talk this morning spoke the most about was this idea of page layouts and chunks and breaking up the page. And also, occasionally we see bolding keywords and that may be even hyperlinks as well. So including hyperlinks, draw the reader's attention. Again, coming back to that idea of the spotted gaze where people are being drawn to either perhaps a bullet point list, bolder words, hyperlinks. So let's just go back. So let's have a look at that in action. You can see a page here. We've got the headings and subheadings. We've got the short paragraphs. We've got the bullet point list which in this case are done as checklists. We've got some design chunks here by having this little section here that helps to break up so it's not just heading paragraph list, heading paragraph list and then we've also got that little section there. Short paragraphs are better for scanning. Two to six or a lot of times when you say short paragraphs, everyone will say but how long? How long is short? Generally two to six sentences per paragraph is ideal. Also importantly use short sentences within your paragraphs. We're going to talk about these in a little bit more detail. So in terms of lists, bullet points and numbered lists draw the reader's attention. It also helps with the spotted gaze pattern as I said. They're able to just quickly go into those little spots on the page that are drawing their attention in. Importantly ideally each list item should be short one line if you can. Again just thinking about the way readers are scanning. It's much heavier for them to be having to read full sentences in bullet points than those short little lines. Design chunks again. So here's an example here. We've got some different visuals, some a video and then a kind of grayed out banner. This is another example here where we've got different cards, some background color with the gray again. And here's another example here where this is a full page and these ones I've cut off the footers. But the footers also help to create a little bit of a sense of those design chunks as well because you can see the colors are different. So they're just a few examples to show you how that which is a design rather than writing but obviously we have to write the content for those designs. So just to bear in mind those nice chunk designs as well. Oh okay. I was thinking that was a fast 20 minutes. Okay so looking at formatting for scanning still but now looking at bolding words. This one you have to be a little bit careful of because you know it looks pretty bad if you've actually got a page that's got a lot of words bolder but every now and again sort of I'd call it a light touch it can really help to communicate some ideas. So even if we have just a little short sentence about what is a companion card and just bolding significant and permanent disabilities will help to cue readers into that detail. So if we come back to our original list we've now covered the first three. The last one we're going to look at is plain language and keeping content clear and concise. So again as I mentioned a little bit of overlap from this morning session but more I see it as it's actually a bit of a different take so it's sort of complementary. Okay so some principles apply no matter what you're writing. I don't know if anyone's heard of the three C's of writing but that content should be clear, concise and consistent. We're not going to talk about consistent today but normally you know that is something that you should look at and that's just consistency with even small things like tense not going from past tense to present tense and changing tenses in the middle of a paragraph. You know if you're using a word and you're using a hyphen with it like co-founder always having it hyphenator rather than sometimes not hyphenated you know only capitalizing your proper nouns all of those things to keep it nice and consistent but we're going to focus a bit more today on being clear and only a very short bit on being concise. So let's go now straight into how to be clear. So we should choose simpler words so rather than having those really long words that perhaps sometimes I think and you know this particularly applies to people who aren't content writers. People think that in even a particularly if they're writing even emails or something they think they have to use the big words to show that they have a good grasp of the language or that they're speaking very formally. But in reality 99 times that will probably 99 million out of 100 million times shorter words simpler words are better. Actually I wouldn't say that because if anyone's done any academic writing I mentioned before that I've done a PhD in writing I had to try and relearn everything because they like these really long fancy words and I had been spent 20 years doing the opposite so that is definitely an exception to the rule but certainly in online writing simple and you should also keep sentences short with a single statement per sentence and that can be as simple when you're editing content as splitting up a sentence from two from one sentence into two sentences. Should use the active voice who's heard of the active voice before the content writer's in the room again oh and a few others and also avoiding jargon I think we've probably all heard about that one in terms of plain English and make sure your writing is well structured and to the point. Let's have a little bit more of a not a deep dive but just a quick look at each of these in a bit more detail. So some examples by the way the Australian government style manual has got quite a good list of some of these words but you know you often see copy that says assist or aid when you can just say help. Generally we for a month we drop the st and we just have a mug now approximately can be shortened to about at a later date is just later endeavor try for that reason because in light of the fact that can just be shortened to since. So these are just a few examples you can easily go online and have a look up a lot more of these if you're writing a lot and particularly if you're not used to writing with these simpler words then you can also look at you know printing them out and having them stuck on your computer so that you can always reference them and for a lot of times people find that they have a particular phrase that they like to use like maybe in light of the fact that and they start a lot of sentences that way and once you become aware of it then it's easy to change it. Okay so in terms of keeping sentences short with a single statement per sentence um obviously the shorter sentences are much easier to read and understand we're going to talk a little bit more in a moment about about that so here's just an example of if we take one long sentence and just cut it into two sentences you're automatically making a lot easier for someone to to read and understand that sentence even if we don't do any of the other things just that one change will help a little bit and then of course once we start doing some of the other things as well then you're in a much better position this first example has is a sentence with 36 words the second one is two sentences one with 23 and one with 15 now the reason why it's good to use simple words and also short sentences is because we need to write content that can be understood by someone with a lower secondary school education so this was one of the things that was mentioned in this morning's session so this is one of the requirements from the global web content accessibility guidelines WCAG 2.1 and which they say lower secondary the Australia's digital transformation agency went even a bit further instead year seven but you get the basic idea you're aiming for year seven to year nine in terms of someone who has a year seven to year nine education could read your copy and understand it particularly important in websites that are going to the general population for example government websites but also you know even someone with a you know master or a PhD will find it a lot easier and faster to find the information they're looking for if it's written at a year seven level now there are some online tools to help with accessibility I'm going to show you one if I can get my mouse there where have you gone there we go so this is just a you can get lots of different tools in this morning session the presenter talked about Hemingway this is just a free WebFX one you can either enter in your URL for existing content or if you're writing content in a Microsoft Word document or a Google doc you can just copy and paste it into get that up you can just copy and paste it here and then calculate readability and what that does is it gives you a readability in terms of the year level so you can say oh my content is currently at year 11 so what can I do to bring it back down to year seven or year nine and the reason why talked about I've got up as part of a heading simpler words and short sentences so the way that these are calculated the way that the reading age or year level is calculated it looks at how long your sentences are so literally how many words are in a sentence so that's why short sentences are better and it looks at how many syllables are in your words so again that's why simpler words are better so if you use shorter simpler words and shorter sentences that will automatically bring down your reading age sometimes when we're dealing with things it can be difficult if we have like a a technological term for example that's three words and longer words you know you start to get into a bit of difficulty with those terms but even if you look at the copy aside from those terms you're trying to get those simpler words those shorter sentences to get that reading age year level down okay so now on to the active voice this is a very quick description of what the active voice is for those of you in the room who don't know it is quite complex to grasp at first so it's something that you might want to go and do it more research on after this but the advantages of it it's clearer more direct and more concise than the passive voice so sentences are either active or passive and so what is it it explicitly states who or what is doing the action and it starts a sentence with this information so if we look at passive examples the house was burned by fire instead of the fire burnt the house the latest engineering techniques were allowed outlined at the conference versus engineers outlined the latest engineering techniques and the same with the next one you're just changing the order of the word so you're starting with who or what is doing the action as a little bit of a cheat hint you'll notice that often in passive voice you have this was, were and then by so as I said you might want to go back and read more and find out a bit more about that because that's a very quick intro into active passive avoid jargon I don't think there's anything more I need to say about that I want to think that you know there's a lot of discussion about that within any kind of content circles I think probably most people know whether you're in content or not in content that you try and avoid jargon where possible now make sure your writing is well structured and to the point so one of the things here that I like to do is to always think about the audience and objective so and sometimes it can be as simple as at the start of your document when you're writing in in something before you go onto the web you might have literally have it spelled out audience and objective and then you're continually going back to what you're writing and saying am I addressing it to my audience and am I meeting my objective or have I gone off in a tangent that's really just not necessary I liked for those of you who weren't in this morning session I actually quite liked the the user story concept of as a and it was it's actually kind of another way of doing this really so it was like as or whoever the audience is so it might be you know as a member of the scientific community I want to so that I can so it's again about the objective but it's just a different way of thinking about it and phrasing it and if you keep those things in mind it'll really help you to structure your content and to stay on point and that will obviously help it to be clear and concise as well and often it's really good to just sometimes before you even start writing just write out what your main points are going to be even like bullet point format you may find that they actually become your subheadings for your page the only thing I'm going to say about the concise I'm going to keep the concise part of this concise which is why use 20 words when you can say it in 10 and also just to let you know there has also been a lot of usability studies that show that content is much more usable when it's concise even to the point where people are able to rephrase what was being communicated on the page more easily if it's written in a concise way certainly when you're using all techniques like making sure it's clear making sure it's concise using some bullet points short sentences simple words then usability is significantly increased so remember our four ways next time you're sitting down to write something use clear and concise headings and subheadings four to six words long keywords at the front if possible place the important information up front think of that pyramid inverted pyramid use some of the formatting techniques we've talked about bolding lists headings and subheadings again and using designs that have chunks and also using plain language to keep content clear and concise simpler words shorter sentences so the last thing I'm going to look at is writing accessible content I'm going to go to my notes now because I've got a little bit more of detail in here so choose your page titles carefully so make sure the page title is descriptive and gives the users an idea of the content they'll find on the page if you do this you're going to meet wcga 2.4.2 level a the other advantage of two of having good page titles is the page titles are very important for SEO search engine optimization so you really want to make that page title work hard for you again short like our subheadings and headings four to six words front loading with your keywords if possible unless you're doing a like a what is because what is actually also returns very well in SEO next one is to use contextual links instead of click here who still sees click here on the oh I know it drives me crazy it's as bad as apostrophe is in the wrong spot yeah so yes click here is still out there somehow so but I mean I think the reason it's out there is because people don't know this and if they don't know how can they not do it so it's important to understand why click here is bad so in terms of the wcag it's 2.4.4 which is to have a link purpose in context so what that means is if you've got to imagine you've got a screen reader so people who are using a screen reader will often have the settings to read out the links so if they're reading out the links and it just says click here they have no idea what they're going to find if they click there but if you have something really descriptive like download 2022 annual report and that whole link is hyperlinked then that's what's going to be read out to them download 2022 annual report and they know exactly what they're getting so that's what they mean by contextual links next one provide labels and instructions when content requires user input this is wcag 3.3.2 level A again mostly applies to forms so if you've got forms on your website make sure you include some instructional content or that it's clear with a you know heading of name or whatever information needs to be put into that box again similarly related keep labels instructions and error messages clear and easy to understand starts to go it's a bit of an extension on the one before it takes us into level AA also use descriptive headings on your pages to organize copy that is actually applies to two wcag 2.4.10 which is level AA and also our level AAA there but again it nicely correlates with our writing for scanning so it gives you two reasons to do it oh and the SEO sorry three reasons to use descriptive headings one is for scanning one is for SEO and one is for our accessibility requirements oh that might be oh there we go right for the lowest secondary school education I've already mentioned that that is part of the wcag guidelines provide definitions for unusual words we're getting into some AAA ones here but just to remember to do those as well whether it's a glossary for example so you're not interrupting your copy or a tooltip or something like that long as it's accessible and provide the expanded forms of abbreviations usually the standard is to do even if you're using like a company name like National Australia Bank you then put in brackets NAB closed brackets and then after that you can always use NAB okay so that is the end of the formal part of the presentation but I'm ready for questions if they're already a few questions have you got the microphone you don't have to repeat the question okay yes uh here the readability tool that you showed yes it is that for any form of English I believe so what form were you thinking of yes oh yes yes that's fine yep sorry the question was was a user was a readability tool for any form of English such as US English and the answer is yes it just does mostly the syllables and sentence length second question do you have an example of an Australian tool for in case words oh sorry do you know of a style manual for the US well the US did I use the Chicago manual of style I think I don't know if there's a government one in the US I know they a lot of there is I mean a lot of publications used to use the Chicago I think it was the Chicago style but I'm not sure sorry I don't know that one I'm usually trying to change people's copy to get rid of the zeds and put in the s's instead going the other way and just behind you there was a question so the question is about the summary at the top of the articles or pages and how long it should be look I don't think there's a magical length part of it is a visual thing like you'll see if it's and it depends to how you'll how the website CMS is set up if you have got that area in the header to put it you're going to wind up with a very big header if you write a long long one so you are trying to keep it short and what the main thing to remember is even if you can't fit every single you know summary of every single message into that if you can just take out the most important ones at least that will let people know that they're on the right page that they want to scroll down to find the rest of the information so but you write it's a balance trying to find that balance of what visually looks good as well and that is not giving them a wall of text and providing that summary information any other questions yeah another one you split the sentence so is that something to aim for like I know you're when you first want to like say they're saying that you wrote the the topic in the you know if the paragraph or paragraph is around the same topic and the people are like is it there for this purpose yep so the question is about when you're splitting up so in the example I had split up a sentence into two sentences and I'd also included a paragraph return I'll speak to that first which is I actually have to confess I did that just to make it more visually obvious to you guys as I was showing it so that was not how I would have done it in the real copy but in answer to your second part of the question which is about you know how long kind of about how long a paragraph should be in terms of being taught through our early years of primary and secondary school that if something is the same topic it should live in the same paragraph certainly you're much more likely to turn two or three paragraphs into five or six paragraphs if you're writing for the online medium so you would cut at places where you might not cut if you're just writing a book or something like that okay I think that's thank you