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Why Writing for the Web and for Print Differ and What to Do About It

Michael Alexander — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:10:27 +0000

Visitors to your Web site won’t read much of your content word-for-word. They’ll scan the text, cherry picking what to read. They’re in a hurry, easily distracted and have limited attention spans. If they don’t see right away what they’re looking for, they’ll bail out.

You can look it up. Go to the Poynter Institute’s or Jakob Nielsen’s site. Those guys have done lots of studies on how people read on line.

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Post tags: editing, Print, Web, Writing & Editing

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12 Things You Should Know about Formating Press Releases

Michael Alexander — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:44:02 +0000

How many times have you gone to your mailbox, flipped through the envelopes and tossed the junk mail in the recycle bin unopened? All the time, right?

Journalists do the same thing with most press releases they receive, whether sent by snail mail or email. As I wrote the other day, I’m planning on writing a series of posts on how to put news about your business into press releases, how to get people to read them and (one hopes) to act on them. I’ve already written about the benefits of writing press releases for your site to promote your business and for your client.

Let’s begin with the begin–i.e. the fundamentals. Here’s a quick run down on how to format your press release whether for print or electronic media:

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Post tags: editing, press releases, public relations, Writing & Editing

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Journalism’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ Helps You and Your Clients

Michael Alexander — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:01:41 +0000

I was collaborating with a designer friend a couple of weeks back on a Web site for a small, but ambitious, client. The client’s primary interest was presenting his business in the shiniest possible way–no surprise there. But I raised the point with him that although we could build an awesome-looking and functional site for him, there was a lot more to think about than the site’s look and feel.

Content matters, as we all know. My point with this client was that he needed to put more info on his site than his marketing info and his service’s unique selling points or USPs. My primary objective was to convince him that his site must have quality content and in sufficient quantity to attract visitors and push up his search engine rankings. I’m not talking here about the usual SEO kinds of like tweaking tags and other things, although that was part of the discussion.

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Post tags: editing, press, releases, Writing & Editing

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The Federal Government’s Secret on How to Write in PLAIN English

Michael Alexander — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:29:07 +0000

If the major mortgage lenders, home buyers and Wall Street had heard of PLAIN, and had gotten rid of the fine print and mishigas in their contracts, we might not be in the economic mess we find ourselves. PLAIN is short for Plain Language Action and Information Network.

A number of federal government agencies formed PLAIN almost 15 years ago with the aim of promoting the use of plain language for government communications.

The big idea was that by using plain language, federal agencies would save time and money and provide better service to the American public. The group offers limited editing services, occasional seminars and other how-to-write services to federal agencies.

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