4 Writing

“The full stop is a great help to sanity.”

Harold Evans, Essential English for Journalists1

Words are the worker bees of the Web and the Internet, used for basic text, headlines, captions, summaries, raw data, archived documents and millions of messages in newsgroups, listservs and e-mail. It is also the written word that makes the web itself work, through the linking of pages with Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML.

And yet, as we will see, the computer screen is not the easiest place to read large amounts of text. In particular, it has almost become a platitude that ‘users won’t scroll’ down the screen to read a long story.

Not everyone agrees. Brock N. Meakes is Chief Washington Correspondent for MSNBC. He believes ‘If you’re ...

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