Before reading on how others feel writing on the web should be tackled, I wanted to see how my writing in this blog has been so far. Taking my previous blog post, Mining for Data, and putting it in the WritersDiet Test, I found out that I have not been doing that well in my writing. My overall score was flabby! I thought I had been doing pretty well in writing this blog and had been feeling a lot more confident in it than I had at the beginning, but the words it, this, that and there are my undoing. I didn't realize what the test calls "waste words" constituted such a huge part of my writing. I had just been casually writing, trying not to be too academic without sounding like a pre-teen on Facebook.
I read the article Test your copy's readability , one of the articles from the Yahoo! Style Guide section on writing for the web. Here it said that because most people will scan quickly first to see if a more in depth reading is necessary, it is best to aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score above 60 out of 100 and for a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level between U.S. sixth and eighth grades. There were directions on how to see what the scores would be using Microsoft Word 2007. I took the same blog entry as before to see what my scores would be on these scales. Again, my results were not so good. I only got 53.9/100 in reading ease and my grade level is 12.5, way above a middle school level.So now I wonder, how can I fix this? One of the articles that I read was on sentence structure. Here I discovered that I am being too wordy with my sentences. On the web, short and simple is better. I have been using too many conjunctions, making my sentences much longer than they need to be. I also need to try to stick to the subject verb object sentence structure to simplify even more.
The other area that I am struggling is in creating a voice. The other article I read dealt with this issue. I had thought that I was just being casual while still making my point in writing this blog. Now I'm not so sure. According to this, my paragraphs can sometimes be too long. As you can see in this post, I have tried to fix this by only making one or two points per paragraph. It really does break up the page nicely and is a lot less intimidating than a big wall of text. In addition, I think I need to make sure that if I choose to either be joking or authoritative, that one style needs to flow through the entire post.
Writing for the web is such a different experience than writing for print. I thought I was being causal on here, easy to follow. I guess the writing that I have to do for other graduate level class has been seeping into this blog. I will definitely be reading more of the article on the writing guide than I mentioned here. Now I am even more nervous about writing the descriptions and part of the simple pages for my group's online exhibit. I just want to make sure that my writing won't reflect badly on the rest of my group. Time to get to work!
