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It depends on the kind of magazine and the kind of website, though.
The lower you get on the magazine food chain, the more things tend to get loosey-goosey, like online publishing. The higher up you go, the more you encounter a formal process that evolved to eliminate the problems the magazine encountered over years of being in business.
I think with the web you get used to writing and reading shorter, more to the point articles, geared more towards people like me with very short attention spans. :)
i think jane doe is on the button here.
writing on the web is shorter and more to the point and i think written in simpler english.
check out any newspaper that has both an online presence and an offline one (and where they don't just republish the same content online)
The great beauty of the web is that you can easily provide layered information - brief and to the point summaries for those who want quick info, but with easy access to more in depth, lengthy and related information for those who want that.
Print articles for the most part tend to be read in a linear fashion, so they are written that way, with a begining, a middle and an end. But on the web there can be links, pop-ups, tooltips, tabbed access to additional details, summaries, headlines, archives etc. The content of an article can be mashed up, extracted, cross-referenced and reused in a myriad of different ways.
Also, on the web, you often have no prior knowledge of where someone will enter an article - it might easily be on page 3 of a 5 page article - or how they will read it - they may only want or need to read a paragraph or two. This needs to be taken account of in the writing.
For me it's important that someone writing for the web understands the way that the information can be structured and presented, or rather will on the particular site they are writing for, and how users are likely to interact with it.
Which not many writers used to writing for print understand at all.
you often have no prior knowledge of where someone will enter an article
Right, you basically have to do "object oriented writing" - stand alone pieces that work when invoked from a variety of other different articles.
Certainly one should tailor writing style to the needs and requirements of specific audiences, but not because of the format it's being read on.
If your text is going to be read by a professional or technical audience then making it simpler isn't going to impress. By the same token, a 2,500 word technical article, with or without diagrams, isn't going to endear the layperson.
The main aspect that needs to be considered, in my view, is layout: articles should be broken down to just one or two sentences per paragraph and have plenty of cross-heads to break up the flow.
As a good example, the BBC News website has moved recently from paragraphs of between one-to-three sentences in length to just one sentence paragraphs.
Writing for the needs of the target audience is key, but so is designing/laying out texts for specific formats.
Syzygy
I bought the book "On Writing Well" which I know is supposed to be a classic in its field. But I personallu found it really boring and overly verbose.
ROTFL!
I love the irony! A book pertaining to teach good writing which is itself poorly written!
Matt
Would you agree that you should write in a less formal tone for the web than for print?
NO!
The web is full of poorly written, informal, cliched, crap. Good writing is equally applicable to print and the web. Period.
Matt
[edited by: Beagle at 11:54 pm (utc) on April 11, 2007]
You shouldn't simply cut and paste from print to Web. Rework anything from print to be less congested on the screen; break it up into thoughts and layers, broken up by subheads and delineated into bullets. Layers can be played out over more than one page, but keeping a thought or idea together on a page. Paragraphs can be split up into thoughts and packaged into sensible segments. Let the reader decide how far to go into the material, but make it inviting to continue. Lay out the material logically.
Remember that the screen is lighted from behind and that many pages are white with small, black text, making the page hard to read. It's difficult to look at the screen for long so lengthy, dense text will be hard and tiring to read. Breaking up the text, highlighting with bold or color or bullets helps relieve the eye. Small font will let you put more on a page, but it will make the material harder to read. Make details easy to pick out -- don't force your reader to hunt for them.
Also remember that most people don't read on a computer screen to "relax." They're looking for something, so make "it" easy to find and easy to read. Think of the last time you shopped in the grocery store and had to hunt for something when you were in a hurry -- that's the sensation many people have reading on the Web when material isn't reformatted for the medium.
Web : Less attention span - make your content easy to read and information easy to find - smaller paragraphs as opposed to large blocks of text.
Print : Leisure reading - introduction : body : conclusion
Since I started writing before PC's were around, much less the internet, I've obviously spent more time writing for print than for the web. I'm now well into my first book-length project since I became familiar with online writing, and was originally thinking it might be a good book for print. But then the horrifying thought came: "What?! Do this without hyperlinks? No way!" OTOH, I'm working on two other projects that are best presented in a chronological, linear way, and I still consider those good possibilities for print. Each medium has its own advantages and disadvantages - try to optimize for whichever one you're using - or, from the other direction, decide which medium is best for what you're writing.
The most important thing for the person who writes for online readers is to make sure that the information that he writes about is newsworthy and of help to the people that read it. Otherwise people will immediately click on the BACK button.
Writing for magazines is another interesting area. The style is totally on the opposite side compared to the stuff written online.
You can find copious amounts of examples for both ways of writing if you browse some of the copywriters' forums on the web.
The most obvious difference is that articles for the Web can--and often should--include hypertext citations (a.k.a. links) to other resources.
Aren't we discussing indeed the textual differences, I mean the conceptual side and not the format itself? As regards the concept and content - the major difference is web articles need to be as shorter and attention attracting as possible.
What are the basic differences between content written for websites (online) and writing for magazines?
ETA: After reading dragsterboy's post a few times, trying to figure out why it didn't completely ring true for me, I think one reason is that IMHO all articles need to aim at providing something useful to the reader, and since we're talking about printed magazines rather than books, being timely is also important for both. It's just as easy to close a magazine as it is to hit the back button - and even easier to think "I bought that last week and nothing in it was useful" and buy a different magazine instead.
--So the question becomes how you do that for each different kind of writing.
[edited by: Beagle at 10:16 pm (utc) on May 15, 2007]
