Sit in on just about any corporate confab concerning online publishing, and sooner or later you're bound to hear something like this: "As you know, our new site is optimized for MSIE 6.0, and our research shows that 90 percent of our targeted audience will be using that. It loads well within acceptable parameters on a 56K connection, and research shows that at least 80 percent of our targeted audience has that capability, while many use high-bandwidth connections ... "

As the technorrhea continues to fly (and discounting for a moment the fact that key terms such as acceptable parameters are only vaguely defined), you're likely to see an approving nod from the managing director and maybe even a furtive high-five between the usability expert and the interface designer.

Daydream for a moment, and imagine the crusty visage of a newspaper editor (you can't help it — Ed Asner as Lou Grant pops into your head, right?) congratulating his staff in a similar way: "Today's edition is terrific, and we think the 80 percent of our subscribers who receive today's paper on time and the 90 percent who see all the pages printed correctly will really appreciate it."

No, Lou wouldn't be in a congratulatory mood at all about statistics like those. But then, a newspaper editor like Lou could be confident that the blueline at press check matched every printed copy of the Los Angeles Tribune that ended up in the hands of readers. A typo on the front page would appear exactly the same to every reader.

Heck, Lou's previous job at WJM-TV in Minneapolis involved producing a live TV news show, and even then he never had to worry that different viewers would hear Ted Baxter make different mistakes. They might see Ted fumble the lead on different sizes of screen, or in color as opposed to black and white, but Lou never had to ask the question, "Murray, did Ted's bungling the Senator's name look and sound the same on your Zenith as it did on my Magnavox?"

Identifying obstacles to Web writing
Writing is all about the interface If, somewhere on Nick at Nite, Lou has moved into the digital age and is running a news Web site, he'll have to consider The First Rule of Online Publishing: For the first time in the history of the written word, authors, editors, and publishers no longer control the user-end interface.

The laundry list of Web publishing obstacles that contraindicate the uniformity of the printed page has been debated almost since the day in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee first proposed a "WorldWideWeb project" on Usenet:

• Multiple computer platforms (PC, Mac).
• Competing Web browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape) with multiple versions.
• Increasingly common non-standard information interfaces such as wireless handhelds.
• Increasing user awareness of the ability to personalize settings (disabling images and cookies, re-setting font type or size).
• Number of plug-ins required and available.
• Internet Service Provider (ISP) issues, such as the limitations of the AOL interface.

The sudden, sinking realization that Web publishing wrests some presentational control away from wordsmiths and managing editors has caused grave consternation (read: fear) among professional communicators throughout the Web's first decade. Three commonly held but mistaken assumptions make life harder than it has to be for writers, and they need correcting.

Mistake 1: Expecting writers to learn how to design.
The lack of ability to uniformly control how Web content is presented to an audience has caused hiring managers to look for writers who can design (and the reverse) and has driven far too many writers to spend hours learning software programs and tweaking HTML code until it's just ... exactly ... right ... wait ... not yet ... now!

Then the e-mail starts to arrive. "I'm using Netscape 3.0 on a Mac through my AOL account and can't get your site to load right. Fix it!" Congratulations ... you've lost control. And while this might sound counterintuitive, the loss of control can be incredibly empowering to wordsmiths and editors if they don't waste hours trying to essentially change professions.

The fact is that just one visual element of an online presentation can be predetermined: the words. As online copywriting guru Nick Usborne has put it, "Words don't care which browser your [readers] use." [2]

Of course, the text and images of any message, in any medium, should be complementary. But on the Web, where the interface your readers will see is simply a best guess, the words must also be strong enough to stand alone to deliver the message independent of design — a mandate that does not apply to print.

If the graphics team you work with "gets it," they'll understand that concept. And if they don't, ask them to log on to the site with you and then point out to them that while their typically excellent and engaging graphics are loading, it's quite likely that visitors to the site will begin reading the text, which inevitably loads first.

Put more forcefully, designers live by the axiom that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. So remind them the typical download process guarantees that in the beginning, the first impression is based entirely on the words.

Let's imagine that you're publishing to such a specific, predefined audience — for instance, an employee intranet using company-issued PCs with preloaded browsers inside a firewall on a high-speed connection — and that you're confident about the accuracy of the Photoshop "blueline" (yep, it's still called that) the design group develops. But what if that's the day the CEO buys a new wireless handheld and tries to load today's headlines? And what's the primary information currency of the PDA? Words. That's a lesson not just for writers, but for everyone sitting in on that corporate confab.

Mistake 2: Conflating all 'Web readers.'
The popular concept of a homogeneous audience known as "Web readers" is as patently ridiculous as lumping together all "book readers." Unfortunately, this misconception was compounded by early Web publishers, who not only discussed the tendencies of "all Web readers" but also stressed the fact that online publishing was available to "all Web readers."

Books have always been available to anyone who wanted them, in libraries and bookstores; but no reasonable author ever studied "the tendencies of book readers" to learn how to make a work-in-progress appealing to "anyone" with "book access."

Mick Doherty's Advice for Web Writers If anyone asks if you're "the content person," SAY NO. Never conflate "copy" with "content." In the world of Web publishing, designers believe "content" includes everything that appears on the page, including graphics. The content management folks believe that "content" includes multimedia files, stylesheets and code. Infrastructure reps believe that "content" means "all deliverables," which can include items like Secure Socket Layer (SSL) security packets. You don't have to be able to do something in order to understand its importance to your work. It's a good idea for writers and editors to understand the basic tenets of Web design, usability testing, information architecture and infrastructure — just as historically it's been beneficial for writers to have a basic grasp of current publishing, printing and distribution models. Write as if the text is the only thing your readers will ever see — because in truth, that's the only thing you can be sure they will see. So, for example, don't let anyone on the design team talk you into a "headline graphic" or a photo caption that's part of the image. Even images properly using "ALT tags" are unreliable.

No, the concept of targeting a specific audience has always been the driving force behind professional writing, and concerns about the limitations of a medium should not overshadow the importance of the message. Nothing about the Web changes the fact that writers need to write to the audience they want to reach. In fact, it's more important than ever.

What's the reason that writing for a predefined audience is more important? "All Web readers" do have one thing in common: They are, to use the parlance of human-computer interaction (HCI) professionals, also users. The redefinition of readers as users represents a very real shift in boundaries between publishers and audience.

Karen McGrane, senior director of information architecture with Razorfish, describes this sea change: "When writing is published to the Web, the reader's activity becomes interactivity [original emphasis]. Awareness that the reader of a document on the Web is also the user of a computer system should make writers more aware of the ... activities that users must engage in to meet their goals." [3]

Interactivity between writers and readers isn't new, of course. However, the immediacy of the interaction and the ability of the reader to alter the presentation of the message furthers the original point: The one part of a Web site that "users" can't alter is the words.

That's why carefully defining the intended audience for online copy is even more important than it has always been in print.

Mistake 3: Assuming there is only one 'Web style.'
Widely proclaimed usability expert Jakob Nielsen caused significant trouble for copywriters everywhere when he announced that on the Web, authors should "write no more than 50 percent of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication." [4]

Of course, that's preposterous. If a writer can cut the message by half without affecting the content, the copy was too long in the first place. The answer isn't to divide "the Web version" into several shorter pages; Nielsen himself argues elsewhere that a certain percentage of readers are lost with each added click.

And yet the litany of "rules for good Web writing" persists: Use lots of bulleted lists and subheads. Keep it short. Take advantage of the ability to link. Keep it short. Write using the "inverted pyramid" of newspaper style. Keep it short. Make sure the writing integrates with the site design. Did we mention you should keep it short?

Syllogism: Publications have style guides. The Web is not "a publication," but rather is a media outlet for every conceivable type of publication. Therefore, the Web has room for — and in fact requires — many different types of style guides.

There's nothing magic about "writing short" if the topic warrants more depth pr if the presentation is better as one longer, scrolling page rather than several interlinked nodes. Your audience's expectations, preferences, and experience should be the driving force in any decision about online copy presentation.

What to do? Write for your audience
Technology allows you to gather once unimaginably precise demographics about who is reading your online publication, but that same technology has taken away the security blanket of fixed format. So, back at the corporate confab, let daydreams about Lou Grant evaporate while the managing director nods and the designer and usability expert celebrate. Breathe deeply and remember these Web writing guidelines:

• You can't control how the publication will actually look to your readers — but you can control the quality of the written content, which is what they see first.
• You need to recognize your audience as "users" with the ability to individually change the look and feel of what they are reading; this allows youto focus on them as "readers."
• You can stop trying to follow a monolithic "Web style," much less trying to write for a single, all-encompassing "Web audience," and develop a style that fits the needs and expectations of your specific audience.

In the end, this technology-enabled shift in control over the publication medium leads back to and reinforces the oldest of all writing maxims: Know your audience. Write to that specific audience in ways they will recognize and appreciate, whether or not those ways fit within anybody's "best practices for Web writing." It's no longer possible to know what your audience will see, so you'd better nail what they're going to read.

Mick Doherty, managing editor for Jetnet, the employee portal of American Airlines, American Eagle and TWA, has been writing for the Web since 1994. Full disclosure: Doherty, December and McGrane were graduate students in the department of language, literature, and communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the mid-1990s. Doherty was editor of Kairos when McGrane's work was published and was briefly managing editor of December's CMC Magazine.

1. December, John. "Why Establish Online Standards?" The Editorial Eye 23:11. November 2000.
2. Usborne, Nick. Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy. McGraw-Hill: 2002.
3. Chauss, Karen McGrane. "Reader as User: Applying Interface Design Techniques to the Web." Kairos: A Journal For Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments 1.2. Summer 1996. http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/features/chauss/bridge.html
4. Nielsen, Jakob. "Be Succinct! (Writing for the Web)." Alertbox. March 15, 1997. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html