The web is awash with alarmingly bad copy, and equally reprehensible lists of the ingredients of ‘good copywriting’. I personally find the fact that there are entire blogs devoted to this topic a bit alarming – as a former writer, I consider the communication of insight to be writing’s primary objective, and believe that (outside of say, experimental dissections of poetic form) the time we spend devoted to the discussion of writing guidelines and elements of form should be minimal compared to that devoted to the practice of creating such writing. Today, though, I found an exception to that rule in Mandy Brown’s thoughtful post on web writing on her blog A List Apart.

I like the idea of abandoning the over-used emphasis on conversion actions as the ultimate goal of website visits, in favor of creating and then preserving a space for reading. Brown has excellent ideas on how to do so, such as increasing the font size of the more weighted first paragraph, and increasing the whitespace padding on each side of the text (the usefulness of this second pointer is easily verified through comparing the experience of reading the post on Brown’s blog to this one).

The only point I’d like to add to Brown’s discussion is a further emphasis on being transparent on who the writer in cases where you’d like readers do more than just skim. Brown describes reading as a solitary process, but I tend to believe that as alone as we may be, reading is a practice of empathy and identification with a writer who is anonymous only in that they are unseen. Our sense of the author is one of the primary classificatory principles we use to judge what we read, and our ability to intellectually connect with writers is what makes reading an undeniably pleasurable experience. This echoes the empirical findings on the importance of establishing the credibility of an online source.

Without a strong sense of author, we are more likely to hesitate when it comes to abandoning ourselves to the experience. Add this to the hesitancy that is by now bred into the experience of online writing for many of us, thanks to a long history of horrendous web writing. As Brown says, designing a web page that reads well is by no means easy.

I welcome thoughts on the more specific aspects that now remain open to discussion – such as, how do such ideas apply differently to blogs, versus personal sites, versus company websites, versus informative sites?