Subscribe through RSSA Manifesto Against Plain Language
The web content space is occupied by two kinds of writers:
Web Content Writers – Those who are pragmatic in their approach, focusing on “plain language” and “soundbite” sentences, who are hyper-aware of website visitors as “users” with physiological parameters that define the interaction they have with words, as elements, published on a technology-based platform.
Their content is often written at the expense of the descriptive fluff that causes emotional responses in readers – tears …laughter …shivers.
Web Copywriters – Those whose words are used to influence, persuade, and sell. Their aim is to connect with target audiences on an emotional level using familiar vocabulary that is not only engaging but purposeful to a website’s page rank and statistics.
Their content is often written at the expense of the brevity and simplicity required to keep visitors from clicking the back button out of frustration.
Who’s Right?
The reason behind the distinct web content factions is simple – web content as a discipline is roughly 5 years old with its claim staked by two disparate groups: those from the User Experience/Library Science/Web discipline and those from Marketing/Communications.
To be fair, both have borrowed and adopted some of the practices from the other to create web content that is not only easy to read, but also supportive of the business objectives or purpose of the website.
But for some reason the plain language camp is more vocal …more militant about the need for bulleted lists over verbose discourse. Perhaps the Marketing/Communications side is so used to being beaten up for haughty language and superfluous diction that they have come to ignore the purists.
After all, this debate is not a new one amongst writers. Journalists are cut and slash editors extraordinaire, while Advertising Copywriters can play with the nuance of language for hours at a time.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
~ George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946
I believe the answer lies in a careful balance between practicality and artistry. Where we acknowledge the humanity of the “user” by creating a fundamental connection through the power of the written word to evoke emotion.
In fact, the universal objective of most websites is to spurn action – click, download, comment, call. By engaging viscerally through the abstract beauty of language, the written word becomes more than a call to ACTION …but one that inspires REACTION.
Plain language advocates can espouse the F-Pattern, Fleisch-Kincaid Readability scores, and content scanning in response to the physiological and educational requirements of a reader but, in my opinion, hard scores will never trump the connection you can make with a reader through carefully crafted prose.
Constructing language to fit on a web page is left-brain. Deconstructing language to derive meaning for a website is not. Right-brain thinking drives perception and emotion – two critical elements websites must have to build customer relationships and make sales.
“Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; She is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty to haunted air, and gnomed mine – unweave a rainbow…”
~ John Keats, Lamia, 1819
If Color and Flavour Names Affect Choice in consumers, why should web content writers focus merely on the steak without adding a little sizzle?
Bulleted-lists won’t entice me to stay at your resort, but a descriptive paragraph that causes me to imagine the feel of sand beneath my feet, the taste of pineapple on my lips, and the serenity of peace on earth away from the hectic bustle of life…. Sign me up!
Information Architect and User Experience professional, Jeff Parks, recently talked about the need to balance our data obsessed corporate culture with an equal amount of creativity, compassion, and understanding of the processes others value to bring back humanity in the digital age.
Being Human is NOT Quantifiable from Jeff Parks on Vimeo.
In his presentation, Being Human Is Not Quantifiable, he talks about how web professionals tend to connect with “users” first and “people” second. In doing so, we are in essence talking to people with the left side of our brain, creating an imbalance impervious to making eye-to-eye contact with the very people we want to engage with.
In the end, the style and tone of web content comes down to the purpose of your website. Less is more. However, less at the expense of creative expression can as much detract from a website’s purpose as it can bolster it.
Words are as expressive and descriptive as images, so depending on the topic it might just make sense to stretch the 150 word-count limit, leave in the first paragraph, and freely use descriptive nouns and adjectives even if it means losing a reader or two.
Otherwise, our society might as well revert back to the sole use of iconography to convey meaning …and our humanity.
My archetype for dealing with the obsession with simplification is none other than Richard Feynman.
Money quote: “That’s the way it works. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else! To another universe, where the rules are simpler, more philosophically pleasing.”
From this video, cue to 20:45, play through to 25:30. It’s a deeply gratifying experience, I recommend it (likewise with that lecture series in its entirety).
Oops, erratum. Feynman says “psychologically easy”, not “philosophically pleasing”.
When you say “plain language” I think you mean the kind of content whose soul has been sucked out for purposes of SEO. It is possible, IMHO, to write content that is both pleasing to read (emotional), easy to parse (plain) and directs the visitor (purposeful). Therein lies the holy grail of web content.
“Content whose soul has been sucked out” – Charlene, I love that!
You’re right, either extreme – SEO laden content or barren utilitarian text – cheats a website out of connecting and engaging with audiences.
Moreover, it robs writers of the passionate pursuit of the holy grail.
Excluding well-written content in favour of images or video isn’t the answer either. At least not yet…
You’ve titled your blog post “A Manifesto Against Plain Language,” but I’m not really seeing any arguments against using plain language.
I do see arguments against relying on F-patterns and readability scores, so allow me to address those.
In the behavioral research by Nielsen that you cited, he observed that users tend to scan the first few words of a heading or paragraph. The lesson being that if you want to entice people to read further, give them the gist of the content up front. What’s wrong with that, exactly?
As for readability formulas, their use is quite controversial among plain language practitioners. But even those who think they have a role to play in making sure content is easy to read and understand, you’d be hard-pressed to find ANYONE who would tell you that content should be written to satisfy the formula.
Ginny Redish spells this out in her article, “Readability formulas have even more limitations than Klare discusses” available from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=344637
Thanks for your sharing your thoughts on this topic, Kristina!
Though to be honest, I feel like your title is, at best, specious, and at worst, inflammatory. If I understand your article correctly, you seem to be saying that using plain language methodologies aren’t an effective way of writing emotionally engaging content. I would agree with you, but plain language approaches, as I understand them, are for evaluating content comprehensibility. They have nothing to do with creating the emotional tone of content, nor the creation of content.
So it seems as though you might be attacking methodologies for what they aren’t intended to do — did I miss something?
I work with a number of fantastic content strategists and writers that specialize in the web. I want them to be as adept at being clear as they are at being engaging. I expect them to be skilled in assessing both dimensions, and hope they will use whatever tools are appropriate for the job to do so.
To put it another way, soulful content that impedes audience objectives is no better than soulless content that achieves them. The trick is achieving the right balance appropriate to the task at hand.
Perhaps a better title would be “A Manifesto for Balancing Clarity with Engagement?”
Kristina,
Stories always tell more about the thing, process or service they describe. They can use emotion and data interwoven to explain to the target audience the message which is their objective. Bulleted lists of features and exclusions succintly tell the user, reader/viewer, audience whether or not the subject is something that should affect them.
Using plain language merely makes the readers experience more effective in a shorter period of time without either pandering or insulting the reader’s intelligence. In fact, using plain language conveys the emotional side of marketing and all other communications more sharply, while increasing the reader’s interest. As both a narrative poet and a user-oriented communications writer/editor/publisher/consultant with 45 years of experience just on this planet, clear language is more effective no matter what the subject, objective or on what the message may be predicated. (Plain language gets the story across quicker, bettter and consistently.
Oh yes, every message–electronic or paper–is affected by the age, experiences, desires, and ability of the reader/viewer/user, whether written in plain language with shorter words, sentences and paragraphs and action verbs or in lazy meandering multi-syllable pronouncements. As Frank the cave-man chiseled, “Bear, here! Diner or dinner?”
While I agree that the title of this post is somewhat unrepresentative of the subject explored, it did do its job in bringing to the table a discussion about web content from User Experience Designers, Writers, Marketers, Web Designers and Developers.
(To be honest, I didn’t deliberately sensationalize the title to get more readers/comments.)
I concede that I approach all web content writing from the Marketing & Communications camp. To me and my clients, content is about ROI. I do not want them to engage me if there is no business value to them. I also believe web content does not exist in a vacuum. For many organizations, key messaging was established and enforced long before the Internet. Given my philosophy that the written word is as much of a business function as accounting, I also advise clients on strategies to align their offline marketing collateral with their web content so as not to diminish either investment.
A few of you have mentioned that the above post probably speaks more to the argument that “user centered” practices for writing web content needs to be more balanced. I completely agree!
The facts:
- People do physically read differently online. We have studies to prove this.
- People are spending less and less time reading and more and more time scanning content. We have studies to prove this as well.
As a writer I need to acknowledge these truths and incorporate them into the content I write for clients. However, rules are meant to be broken …and perhaps, this is what I wanted to address in my post.
Sometimes we get so caught up in the golden rules of web writing, that we forget that the words we write hold as much creative weight as the graphic elements on the web page itself.
I just finished writing web copy for a client that threw SEO and Plain Language out the window. We decided on a unique approach that was more about the renaissance of prose than it was about key messaging. Of course, this too, was a Marketing approach that was decidedly taken.
Perhaps the greater sub-text here is about what web writing means to society. The last image I included was the result of a discussion I had with a middle school language arts teacher. She explained to me that kids these days are so used to icons and images online that they no longer read …anything. The school has conceded that they will be allowed to satisfy their curriculum by “reading” graphic novels instead.
Of course, within the greater context, this isn’t a plain language/marketing communications debate at all. It’s one of the philosophical ponderings of “What we do in life, echoes in eternity”.
As more and more of my clients choose less and less written web content over infographics and video – - are we as writers losing the argument with society that there is not only business value in the written word …but human value as well?
I’m not sure the contest is between pragmatism and verbose discourse. If it were then pragmatism would win.
There’s no room for verbosity and I’m not sure there ever was.
I think your assertion that what we’re looking for is a “careful balance between practicality and artistry” hits the nail on the head entirely.
Bullet points have their place. More expansive, aspirational, enticing copy also has its place (within reason). In calling ourselves professionals we’re saying we know what that place is; what goes where; what works.
If being human is not quantifiable then why do we try and make it so? As a writer I much prefer to think that I can reach a target audience at a gut level – a level that actually means something, rather than communicate in a technically proficient but soulless manner.
This is analagous to the ‘SEO copy for search engines or humans debate’ of a while back. To any writer worth their salt it was never a debate – it was about the human element. It was about creating copy (yes, adjectives included) that meant something to someone.
It still is.
In a world of political correctness it was inevitable that you would choose this topic. The title “Being Human is not Quantifiable” appeals to the basic human need of being recognized. Your industry is very recent. It is developing its “techno babble” and this language needs to be recognized without creating shock waves in an academia-based society. Every profession has its vocabulary and its corresponding grammatical proficiency to enable the literate to read it. Whether they understand what they are reading is another matter.
You are right when you say it is a fine balance between artistry and practicality. The winner will be the one who can achieve that balance consistently. That consistency will ensure the development and sustainability of your line of work. The success of the business employing you as a writer will give this new “language” credibility.
Rome wasn’t built in a day and language recognition did not come in a day. Time is the factor that does that.