posted Monday, March 03, 2003 at 10:24 pm MST*driving another nail into the case*
"Writing for the Web" at useit.com reads in part: "Much is known about how to write help text, online documentation, and other technical writing, and a good deal of the advice from these fields does transfer to writing for the Web. The main difference is that Web readers are much less motivated than readers of online docs since they can't know whether the site is relevant to their goals (in contrast, the docs are always relevant to using a product, even when the writing stinks)."
Yaa ... in a world of hype and brochures, we browse, skim, surf ... a situation where attention deficit is appropriate? So, then, when the material is properly scoped, ...
Here's some explication from Sun Microsystems' WebWriting Guidelines:
* 79% of users scan the page instead of reading word-for-word
* Reading from computer screens is 25% slower than from paper
The intro reads "You can double the usability of your web site by following these guidelines: for two sample sites studied in Sun's Science Office, we improved measured usability by 159% and 124% by rewriting the content according to the guidelines." and points out that "Web content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent"
