"Why do people use text decoration online?" you may, rightly, cry in indignation. The answers seem to be:
- to highlight important bits
- to catch the reader's eye and tease them into reading the whole piece
- to confuse readers about what's functional (link) or just for effect (underlined text)
- to make things look pretty.
Know your freaking audience
Know your audience members, and you'll know what content appeals to them. You'll also know how to present that information (using, you know, language, images, video, etc.) to greatest effect.
Write for the damned medium
Certain techniques apply to writing for the Web, and to making content capture the mico-second attention spans of scanning readers. A good writer should know and employ these.
Write with empathy, for the love of God
Decorate the bits of text that you feel are most important, and you pay little respect to your thinking reader. Frequently I find the bits that aren't bold (or otherwise decorated) the most interesting. Don't you?
Leave formatting to the style sheet, and give us all some peace
Formatting of text is intended to communicate structure. Using text decoration to make things look pretty is for sissies. Your text should do the job without additional visual fancification.
As someone said to me recently, nut up or shut up. If your text isn't strong enough to stand naked before the reader, don't publish it.
No comments:
Post a Comment