Writing Matters

Your Web Content Is Hurting My Eyes and My Brain

Dear U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,

Usually I comment on the quality of the writing at a web site, but I've got to talk to you frankly today. The text on your home page is hurting my eyes:

• Your masthead is right-aligned
• Your left column is centered
• The labels for the main sections of your site are left-aligned (white text on a blue band) but each item listed below is right-aligned, which leaves a ragged blank mess on the left

SEC, I don't know where to look. My eyes are hopping around everywhere; I am conducting a very unproductive experiment in scanning. Maybe you could make your page look more like the Food and Drug Administration's home page. The FDA's isn't perfect, but the text is left-aligned.

SEC, please bone up on the usability research on text alignment. For homework, you must read:

• Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability by Jakob Nielsen
• Eye Gaze Patterns while Searching vs. Browsing a Website from Usability News

And, SEC, whatever you do, please do not use the HR Management home page as your model. The only thing worse than text with hard-to-scan alignment is text that moves.

-- Leslie O'Flahavan

The Onion Reports: "Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text"

Gloomy March weather getting you down? Tired of copyediting the same old technical report or web page? Take a laugh break and check out The Onion's hard-hitting Science and Technology article: "Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text," which describes readers' distress at encountering an unscannable document:

Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

The article includes reader reactions to the Large Block:

• "Why won't it just tell me what it's about?" said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson ... "There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words." 
• "It demands so much of my time and concentration," said Chicago resident Dale Huza ... "This large block of text, it expects me to figure everything out on my own, and I hate it."

And yes, Charlyne and Dale are pretend readers, however strongly they resemble some real readers we've all had to cope with.

Need more Onion in your day? Check out "National Essay Writing Contest Now Accepting Video Submissions" and "Creative Writing Teacher Announces Plan To Sit On Edge Of Desk."

-- Leslie O'Flahavan

P.S. Many apologies if I am finding these pieces funnier than you are. I've been laughing at that last one for about 10 minutes. Of course, I do have a B.A. in Creative Writing, so I probably had that teacher in college.

Wordle: My Favorite New Toy

Wordle may not be new, but it's new to me and I can't stop playing with it. Wordle is "... a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text." For word-loving writerly types, Wordle is irresistible. Not only does it take your words and make them look pretty, it displays them in a way that reflects their importance.

Here's the word cloud Wordle generated when I input most of the content from our E-WRITE home page. I'm thrilled with it for a couple of reasons:

• The words writing and content are huge, and that's what E-WRITE is all about.
• The cloud gave me insights into underlying meanings or emphases in my text. I didn't realize that want, need, and needs figured prominently in my home page copy. I'll have to contemplate this discovery for a while to decide what to do. Should I edit these terms out or celebrate the fact that they show up so often?

Other cool uses of Wordle:

• Study a politician's speech. ReadWriteWeb offered Word Cloud Analysis of Obama's Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln's 

• Present survey data. About a year ago, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press asked voters for one word that best described the candidates for president and vice president. Pew used Wordle to display the survey results. Here's the biggest Wordle word for each candidate: McCain - OLD, Obama and Palin - INEXPERIENCED, Biden - EXPERIENCED.  Interesting word clouds, especially in light of the election results! Check out Pew's Wordle clouds at The Candidates: In a Word
  

-- Leslie O'Flahavan

P.S. Thanks to D. Kokinda for turning me on to Wordle!