Writeyness :: Info to snack on

All I want for Christmas is a blanket with sleeves. Luckily, The Slanket (”The Loungin’ Blanket”) is exactly that.

And it’s proof that the best ideas are the simplest ones.

The Slanket creator, Gary Clegg, was hunkered down in his student dorm room one night, wrapped up in his sleeping bag watching TV, when he discovered he couldn’t work the remote without exposing his arms to the bitter cold that is life in a frigid dorm room.

A few snips of the scissors later and an early prototype of The Slanket was born. Several years, a manufacturing deal, and one website later and The Slanket 2.0 is a raging success. Even, dare I say, a hot product (sorry).

It’s (now warm) creator is committed not only to keeping the world warm while it plays Playstation and eat popcorn on the sofa, but to bringing it together: “Across oceans, across cultural boundaries, let’s unify! One Slanket at a time.” is the handwritten message overseas buyers receive with their package of fleecy goodness.

In the new edition of the classic “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser, the author updates his introduction to tackle the growth of online communications.

This quote stands out:

“Millions of email messages every day give people the information they need to do their job, and a badly written message can do a lot of damage. So can a badly written Web site.

“The new age, for all its electronic wizardy, is still writing-based.”

From attracting search engine traffic to selling products and services, there’s no doubt that good content and copy can help your website be more successful and, as Zinsser wrote, badly written copy can hurt it.

Yet, despite this, the creation of the words that will guide visitors through a website, describe the products or services and do the selling is still treated almost as an afterthought when businesses first develop their sites.

In many cases, a writer is later called in to add essential missing content or repair poorly-written copy that could have been costing a business who knows how much in lost revenues during the intervening weeks… months… years.

And often just a few tweaks will produce immediate results.

Shameless plug: Click here for a free review of your home page’s copy.

East Stirling, bottom of the Scottish Third Division, may be the worst football team in Scotland, but no other professional sports club’s website (that I’ve seen anyhow) can touch The Shire’s site at www.eaststirlingshire.com. Even if the team only get a couple of people and their dogs on match days, the site deserves a wider audience…

When I started as an 18-year-old trainee reporter at The Dundee Courier with dreams of uncovering corruption at the highest levels of Government (a la All The President’s Men), I was told that readers should be able to get the main points of a story just by reading the headline and first paragraph. And they should be able to just scan the front page to get a handle on the day’s most important news.

The conclusion comes first, and the rest of the story is fleshed out from there — the opposite of many other styles of story-telling that start slowly and build to a climactic ending.

This is known as the “inverted pyramid” style of writing, although the craggy old journo who gave me this advice would rather have stuck pins in his eyes than use such a jargony term as “inverted pyramid.”

And before the Internet took over the world, newspapers were the main outlet for this writing style.

Not any more.

Copywriting for the Web is a lot like writing for newspapers in terms of the overall structure. Your home page is the front page. And, just as newspapers have clearly-labelled departments, so websites have clearly-labelled sections.

When it comes to individual pieces of copy, just as newspapers try to grab the attention of readers with eye-catching headlines, so Internet pages need to grab the attention of browsers — and quickly — with similar headlines or offers. And just as newspaper readers are often pressed for time — preferring to browse the paper first, then dig down into the stories that interest them when they have more time — so you have to be conscious that the clock is constantly ticking on how long a visitor is prepared to hang around on your website.

That’s why you have to know your audience and target them well.

Then grab their attention and get your main points across. The details come later.

And no, I didn’t get my Watergate-style scoop. Sadly, the closest I came to uncovering corruption was questioning a referee’s offside decision when covering a football match.

I once worked a couple of shifts as a sub-editor on the sports desk of The Scotsman newspaper in their swanky new offices in Edinburgh (steps south of the new Scottish Parliament money pit / architectural wonder, and west of the craggy, er, Crags).

“Subbing” involves pulling a news story off the “wires” and editing it down to fit snugly in its allocated space in the newspaper layout. The sub-editor also has to add a headline and picture captions.

In front of you is a screen with your allocated page space, and you have to chop away at the article until there is no overspill.

Sometimes, if the original writer has fallen victim to a serious case of “writeyness” and ignored any length guidelines, this can involve hacking 1000 words down to 200 or 300 or less. And you could have as little as 20 minutes to do this in — all with a desk editor breathing down your neck.

It’s a great exercise for any writer in finding the meat of a story and cutting off the excess fat. And I’ve found it an invaluable skill to have when it comes to writing short, concise Web copy, and when editing copy supplied by clients.

Quite simply, Web copy has to be leaner than a butcher’s dog. And “lean” doesn’t necessarily mean short. Your copy should be as long as it takes to get your main points across in the most effective way.

If you’re worried that your copy is showing a little weight around the middle, click here for a free home page review. (No strings).

As I mentioned in a previous post, headlines are important. And it’s interesting to see how traditional news outlets handle the unique challenges posed by the Web. Many, such as The Guardian, will put a factual, to-the-point, more Web-friendly headline on the main page, and use a longer, more detailed, creative or amusing one on the actual story page.

Others, such as CNN, use subheads on the story page to expand on the main headline. (Subheads are also a great tool for stressing secondary benefits in sales copy.)

Of course, when it comes to headlines, you should try to avoid any embarrasing slip-ups, like these:

• “Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant”
  “Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge”
  “Stolen Painting Found by Tree”
  “Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Space”

While the Web and clever headlines may not always be a good fit, puns are still alive and kicking in the print media. And by far the best proponents of puntastic headlines are the British tabloids. Love ‘em… hate ‘em… eat your fish and chips off ‘em… the old Red Tops can spot a pun coming a mile off.

So, to end with, here’s the best headline in the world ever (in my opinion), from — who else? — The Sun. It appeared after Inverness Caley defeated Celtic 3-1 in a Scottish footballing shock result:

Genius. (And, just in case any of you didn’t see Mary Poppins as a child, this link should clarify things.)