Bernard_Marx - 4:56 pm on Feb 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

Is your content written with your target audience in mind? Do not use words like vehement when words like forceful or full of energy will convey the same meaning.

Yup. There's the offending passage. Of course, the "Do not use.." sentence is implicitly modified by the "target audience". DrDoc knows these arguments already, but I might as well air them here (because we are at risk of developing a branch of this thread over at the Javascript forum!).

It's very good advice when applied to sites that are appealing to a mass audience, and will benefit from appealing to the lowest common denominator. But what may be good advice for The Sun may not be such good advice for The Guardian (translate to your own newspaper comparison).

Indeed The Sun outstrips The Guardian in sales many times over, but hasn't Brett recently been telling us that, if we're looking for our own bite of internet pie, there's much more meat to be found in the tail?

Switching to idealism, I'd like to add my voice to those who would like to complain about the diversity crushing power of search engines. We shouldn't be surrendering our language to them as well (Google Newspeak anyone?).

I realise that the newspaper analogy doesn't apply for many sites, even from an idealist perspective. A government information site has no business being interesting. Its business is providing information, and making that information accessible to all, including people of limited vocabulary (or even intelligence).

Nice article, Doc.