Lane Ashfeldt, Short stories, Teaching, Writing
In Short stories, Teaching, Writing, fiction on November 6, 2009 at 11:03 PM
Assignments had to be handed in just before Halloween, so at the moment my evenings are taken up with marking them. I’m really enjoying this, the only trouble so far has been some slight unhelpfulness on the part of my computer…
What I like, actually, is when a few people select the same topic to write about. I’m fascinated to see how many different slants they can find. It’s not just that no two are the same: no two are even vaguely similar. It’s something like a voxpop, only with each person delivering 750 words of crafted text. Whereas if they’d been door-stepped by a TV crew, the probable end result would have been fifteen seconds of crushing embarrassment.
websites, Writing, Writing for the web
In Factual writing, Teaching, Writing, Writing for the web, websites on November 4, 2009 at 11:35 AM
Repetition was something English teachers told you to avoid. ‘Vary your expressions’ they’d say, or, ‘Can you think of another way to say that?’
Repetition is unpopular with a lot of writers too, but when writing for the web it’s OK to use the same term several times. Repetition helps make it really clear what you’re talking about. It doesn’t mean you think your readers are stupid – only that you accept that they haven’t want to hang around, they just want to quickly skim-read the page and get on.
In a magazine style web page that’s a trusted source – a space they visit regularly – online readers tend to slow down a little, but on most factual sites they want to:
- get in
- find what they’re looking for
- get something done
And they don’t want any textual cleverness to trip them up along the way.
