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It is important to spend time addressing how to write for an intranet. The content can be as varied as the people writing it. Since material can come from a number of different sources too, it can vary in style and effectiveness. There will be "shovelware"-material that already exists on paper and is merely shoveled onto the Web. There will be material originally created specifically for the intranet. It is important that someone be responsible for the quality of writing of Web materials.
Ultimately, writing for a corporate intranet requires a new set of skills that blend solid writing, an understanding of the physiology of reading light instead of matter, and the various aspects of an intranet that make it the unique medium it is: hyperlinking, multimedia, and interactivity.
Effective Web pages will need to be based on effective writing that is geared toward the appropriate audience. Professionals working in the Communications or Public Relations department may well be the best equipped for that task, except for one small problem: They have been trained to write material that will end up in print. As I noted early in this book, the Web is nothing like paper.
Ultimately, writing useful material for a corporate intranet will require a new set of skills that blend solid writing, an understanding of the physiology of reading light instead of matter, and the various aspects of an intranet that make it the unique medium it is: hyperlinking, multimedia, and interactivity. Online, it's not just how well the article reads. Consider, for example, that Point-the organization that rates sites on the World Wide Web-evaluates content, presentation, and experience. Was the site worth the time? Did it work? Would you advise your co-workers of its existence in order for them to be able to do their jobs better, faster, more efficiently? All of these concerns influence how you write for the online world. Tagging the content, putting it into HTML format, is a significant component of preparing material to go online, but the best tagging starts with good writing, so be sure to look for writing skills over HTML experience. A host of editors are available that automate the HTML process; many lay claim to allowing individuals to create rich and detailed Web pages without knowing a scrap of HTML. Some, like Microsoft's Front Page, even allow beginners to use pre-configured "bots" instead of CGI scripts, which tend to be the sole province of those schooled in the writing of PERL and C++.
The experience of reading text on a screen is dramatically different from that of reading text in print. When writing and designing for an intranet, keeping the key differences in mind will help you prepare material that people can easily digest. Some of the key differences include type size and scrolling.
When type is specified for print, it is based on the designer's knowledge of what kind of type and what size of type works best for various kinds of material. In those studies, however, individuals held the printed matter in their hands and adjusted its length farther from or closer to their eyes in order to be able to focus most easily on the words. When people read type on a computer screen, though, it is their eyes, not their hands, that do the work. Watch people looking at a computer. When a new screen appears, they do not push or pull the monitor; nor do they slide farther away from or closer to the screen. That puts strain on the eyes.
Type appears differently on different monitors. In print, 12-point type will always look like 12-point type. You wouldn't have much luck using a type gauge to measure the same typeface on several different monitors, however. The size of the monitor, the adjustments the user has made to the size of the screen, the type of video card, the software employed, and a variety of other factors all influence the actual size of the type. Thus, the assumption that 12-point type is big enough may not be accurate.
When people read long columns of print in text, they use a combination of movements to make the act natural. They move the paper, they move their heads, they move their eyes. When text exceeds what can fit on a screen, however, the reader has only one choice: scrolling down through more text. Additionally, when people read paper, their eyes travel down the length of the text. When they read material on a computer screen, their eyes remain fixed and they use scrolling functions to move the text instead. That creates more strain. All that scrolling through text has the same physiological effect on the eye as riding in a car. There, things move faster than the eye is designed to compensate for, and the eye's effort to compensate results in a feeling of carsickness. Similarly, scrolling text is another unnatural motion to watch, and among other things, can cause eyestrain or other unpleasant feelings.
The first consideration in preparing material to be read on an intranet is to identify the group or groups of employees for whom the material is intended. You might think, that's easy: the employees! There are many ways to categorize employees: by department, by classification (clerical/management), by teams, and so forth. Each audience requires an approach that accommodates its needs. You need to consider the type of material you are preparing for that audience, the background information the audience already has, and the level of sophistication and depth required in order to adequately communicate the information to that audience.
Most challenging, however, is writing a piece that will be read
by multiple audiences. Later in the book we will talk at length
about the application of compensation issues for an intranet,
but compensation will serve as a good example of multiple audiences.
One of the ways to use an intranet for compensation is to provide
information on the salary (or performance) evaluation process,
and to provide supervisors with the online forms they need to
complete the process.
NOTE |
You must remember that employees will get right to the section of the intranet that interests them without the benefit of introductory material they would see in a comparable manual or booklet. |
In this case, material that explains the process is geared toward two separate audiences: employees who need to understand how they are evaluated, and supervisors who actually engage in the process. Three types of information are involved:
In print, the inclination is to produce a single document with clearly delineated sections. On the Web, however, you must remember that employees will get right to the section of the intranet that interests them without the benefit of introductory material they would see in a comparable manual or booklet. Because of that capability, the writer must prepare material that is clearly written for the audience, which may be a line employee or may be a supervisor.
Therefore, it makes sense to create two separate tracks for the same information. When information that is provided in one section can be of value to the readers of the second track, a link can be provided in order to take advantage of the information, as illustrated in Figure 7.1.
Figure 7.1 : Dual information tracks.
In this example, employees can follow a link in order to see the numerical rating scale that supervisors will use to rank their performance on various elements of their jobs.
Figure 7.2 shows the page the employee reads with the link to the appropriate supervisor's page, while Figure 7.3 shows the supervisor's page itself with information that could be of value to the non-supervisor employee.
Figure 7.2 : An employee-oriented page.
An employee-oriented page about performance evaluations, including a link to supplemental information contained as a coherent part of the supervisor's document.
In journalism school, aspiring newspaper writers are taught the "inverted pyramid" style of writing for hard news stories. At the top of the inverted pyramid-the widest part of the triangle-the reporter is supposed to cram as much of the most relevant information as possible. Here, in the "lead" paragraph, the writer should note the most important facts: who, what, when, and where (and, when appropriate, why and how). As reporters work their way down the pyramid, they continually produce narrower and narrower information.
The inverted pyramid style of writing is a perfect metaphor for the construction of a Web page, and particularly for organizational material to be posted on an intranet. This style accommodates employees who will read the entire article in the traditional linear fashion and those who use a search engine, an index, or follow links to read only the parts in the context that is of interest to them.
Breaking a document designed for the Web into a series of logical chunks is a new approach to presenting information. The employee reading in a linear fashion can follow a simple progression of links from one page to another.
Some people may find it confusing to have material appear in chunks. Thus, you should strike a balance between providing intact, coherent information and breaking the information down into component elements that avoid excessive scrolling and allow employees to find specific information they need. The following guidelines might help you make decisions about when to break material into chunks:
By providing built-in navigation tools such as hyperlinking from a table of contents, the employees can choose to read only the material stories in which they have a direct interest without having to scroll through the document.
An example of this is a newsletter or bulletin. The top of the bulletin should contain a table of contents, each line reflecting the subject matter of each story and hyperlinking directly to that story within the document. At the end of the story, a hyperlink should allow the employee to return to the table of contents.
For a multi-page document, a table of contents or an index is an essential navigation tool. Provide a button or icon to take readers back to that first page so they can find their place again if they get lost of confused. This also enables them to return to a subsequent topic of interest stimulated by the table of contents. Each topic in the document should be listed in an index and linked to the document. Either or both of these tools are particularly important in documents that contain a deep structure with multiple levels of links in order to make the material in the document accessible.
Every Web document should contain certain consistent elements. You should strongly encourage all those providing content for an intranet to incorporate these elements into their documents; you also should incorporate a list of these elements in any documentation you produce for your content providers, to accompany the various procedures and rules you establish. The following is a listing of these elements and a description of the role each plays in making your Web documents of greater use to the employees in your organization.
Documents should state where they fall in the overall hierarchy, especially on their home pages. Because people can create links from anywhere, it can be difficult to relate the links back to a physical document such as an employee manual. Employees who drill down to the information in a linear manner can also benefit from location notes.
If the elements of the document are part of a cohesive whole-such as elements of a training module-you need to maintain the flow from one element of the document to the next, so it may not be as critical to provide context for people who happen to beam in from another site. Still, you should provide at least some information to help ensure they can figure out where they are.
There are several ways to show people where they are. One is to provide navigational icons at the top or bottom of the page (or both). You should have established navigation guidelines for your intranet so that incorporating such icons can be a simple task. Another navigational trick is to incorporate a link to the home page of the division or department to which the page belongs. You also should use the title of the document to help employees know where they are. (There's more on titles in just a few paragraphs.)
You should establish a standard to communicate the condition or status of the material employees are reading. You need to come up with the icons, phrases, or other guides that employees will immediately recognize throughout the intranet that provide clues as to the status of the document they are reading. At the very least, documents should be dated. All information is not equal, and there are guides that can help employees understand the age, nature and quality of the information.
Some information is absolute, such as hazardous waste guidelines or termination policies. Some information is complete, while other information might be works in progress, or parts of documents. Some might be in the form of opinions. Some might be legacy information, maintained for historical purposes but hopelessly out of date. Employees need to know this information in order to assess its value and usefulness.
Documents also should be signed by the individual who wrote it. The author's name should be linked to the home page. There should be a directory listing of all employees that are also linked to their home pages. The directory listings could also include brief profiles on the employees.
Each document should have a clear, short, concise title. The title appears in the bar at the very top of every browser, and should be maintained through every subsequent page within the document. Titles can change through addition. For example, if the title of the document refers to the Employee Handbook, title bars could read:
Because the main component of the title does not change, employees always know where they are.
The headline is the first thing the employee sees on a page, and should make it clear what the document is about as well as the type of document it is. If you use multiple levels of headings, be sure to use them in consecutive descending order. For example:
<H1>Re-Engineering Models</H1> <H2>Quality Improvement Support Document #12</H2>
On a Web page, this would look like Figure 7.4.
Because the Web offers the use of colors for text and links, the use of these colors becomes more than a mere aesthetic exercise. Making sure that one color always represents a new link and another always represents a link that the user has already accessed can make documents more useful to the reader. Similarly, the ability to assign colors to non-hyperlinked text also can be useful if you apply a methodology to the use of color that helps the reader identify the nature of certain text or its place in the overall document.
The tone of the writing will affect how likely an employee is to begin reading, and to stick with the piece. The World Wide Web has created a tendency to take a single tone with all material: flip, tongue-in-cheek, even a little sarcastic. Your intranet, however, is not the World Wide Web!
When establishing tone, consider your audience, the type of document you are writing, the proper approach for presenting the material, including where it is to be posted.
Earlier in this chapter, I suggested striving to achieve a balance between creating a cohesive, whole document and dividing information into chunks and adding pertinent hyperlinks. Nevertheless, a Web-based document is all about hyperlinking; that's the strength of the medium. Because an intranet allows you (and anyone else who provides content to the intranet) to create links to related material, the old adage that "knowledge is power" has undergone a dramatic change. Knowledge alone is no longer power in the wake of intranets. Instead, structured access to knowledge is where the real power lies. Power is the ability to get what you need when you need it, the ability to get information just in time. In a print-oriented world, information was collected in paper documents and distributed to all employees so they would have it stored in some drawer or on a shelf just in case they needed it, which is a far less efficient way to go about providing access to information.
When writing for the online world, the use of links should be based upon the need to give the reader a feeling of control over the document, the ability to dig deeper or acquire information that is contextually related to the document he or she is reading. There are two simple rules to help communicate the nature of links: be specific, and pay attention to the reasons behind links.
At first glance, links like "Next," "Previous," "Up," and "Down," that lead to positions such as the next page, the previous page, up one level, and down one level seem adequate. On many pages, a simple arrow is supposed to do the job. However, it is important to remember that employees could be leaping in from anywhere, and these links could use a little more substance to inform employees specifically where the link will take them. A few extra words can help users make quick decisions about where in the document (or even outside of the document) to go. For example, instead of just "Next," it's much more helpful to the reader to see:
Of course, this guideline does not apply to navigation
tools that have been mandated throughout the entire intranet,
such as an icon that denotes the intranet's home page. Since employees
will quickly grow accustomed to seeing this icon, there is no
need to add "Intranet Home Page" to enhance their meaning.
NOTE |
Don't succumb to the temptation to add a link that goes back one level in every circumstance; make sure there is a reason the reader would want to know that the page sequentially follows an earlier page, or is one level down from a page in the hierarchy. |
Often, an arrow pointing to the left means it will take the reader back one level, assuming that is where the reader came from. That's a dangerous assumption, since the reader could have come from another part of the intranet altogether, finding that particular page via somebody else's link or from the result of a search query. Unless the document is linear, resist the temptation to use a "back" tool; and even if the document is linear, adhere to the rule in the last section and be more specific about to what page the reader will be taken back to if he or she clicks on that link.
Don't succumb to the temptation to add a link that goes back one level in every circumstance; make sure there is a reason the reader would want to know that the page sequentially follows an earlier page, or is one level down from a page in the hierarchy. Usually, an employee who wants to go "back" will simply use the "back" button built into the Web browser.
Pick up any print document-a memo, a magazine, or an advertisement. Read it, and while you read it, make a mental note about what draws your eye, what distracts you from the overall flow of the message, what changes the attitude you have toward the writing. Often, it's the size of type, the way the type is treated, the color of the type. A writer or designer wanting to grab your attention will shift from standard text to bold face, italic, larger text, and even present it in a different color. It's designed to affect the way you read the material.
Links affect readers in similar ways, even when that is not the designer's intention. Links appear in a different color than the rest of the text, and they are usually underlined. That manipulation of the text catches the attention of the readers and they need to make a decision about whether to continue reading the main document or see where the link leads them. Links, therefore, can disrupt the flow of the text. If the employee follows the link, and subsequent links from there, returning to the main document can be forgotten or passed by. Concise writing remains important when readers are a click away from moving to new material.
Links can be very useful, for example, to provide supplemental documentation to main documents or to speed access to links such as e-mail addresses or URLs. However, excessive links or links to barely relevant supplemental material will discourage use, so strive to achieve a balance between links and relevance.
Often, writing on Web pages reflects the actual actions that are required of the reader or the mechanics behind the text. How many times have you read (or even written) text like:
This is more than the reader needs to know, and is distracting from the substance of the document. When an employee enters a restricted part of the building, the sign on the door may read: Authorized Access Only. The employee knows what this means, and if the employee has access, he or she knows what to do. The sign never says:
"Swipe your authorized card key through the reader, enter the secret code on the numeral pad, then push on the door to gain access."
That's a mechanical description that just doesn't need to be on the sign; the simple three words of the first example are adequate. The same is true for words in a magazine:
"Continued on page 12."
The reader knows automatically to turn to page 12. The tag line never reads:
"This article continues on page 12, so turn the pages until you get there, then continue reading in the column that indicates it is the continuation of this story."
How, then, do you denote the links? As noted above, the links will speak for themselves, since they are underlined and in color. So, don't write:
"Click here to read the CEO's latest speech."
It would be much more effective and less intrusive to write:
"The CEO's latest speech dealt with declining sales."
Similarly, there is no need to direct people to elements of your writing within the page on which the writing appears; that is, don't write about your writing, since that, too, distracts the reader from the key points. For example, don't write: "Following is a list of actions to take when a reporter calls."
The reader is able to see the list without having the writer point it out. Instead, write:
"When a reporter calls you "
Without special preparations, linked text of one kind looks pretty much like linked text of another. They all are underlined and appear in color. If that is the only indication you provide as to the nature of a link, the employee reading the document will not know if the link is to another section of the same page, another document directly related to the current document (such as the next chapter in an online tutorial), a supporting document that was created to be an integral part of the main document, an outside resource elsewhere on the intranet, or a document on the Internet's World Wide Web.
Knowing the type of document to which the link leads will help the reader decide whether or not to go to it. Thus, you should develop a scheme to help readers identify the nature of the link. The easiest way to do this is simply by stating where the link goes in the text itself:
You can also manipulate the type itself. If you implement an icon scheme, for example, throughout the entire intranet, employees quickly will learn that an icon of a globe means the link will take them to the World Wide Web, while two arrows pointing at one another represent an internal link.
No employee magazine or manual goes to press without being proofread. After it has been readied for desktop publishing and sent to the printer, the individuals responsible for the publication get a final opportunity to make sure everything is right-that the pages are in the right order, that none of the pictures have been inserted upside-down, that captions are appearing with the appropriate photo. This document they review is called a "blueline," so named because it is a photographic positive of the actual publication in which the images all appear in various grades of blue.
You should always proofread your document, and before you release it to the public, make sure that all the links go where they are supposed to go.
In the print world, a writer drafts an article that may be adjusted to some degree by an editor, and then the words are committed to paper. The paper is pushed out to the reading audience. The words are indelibly captured on paper, never to be changed. The only voice is that of the writer. The only way the reader can participate is to write a letter to the editor. On the Web, the world is interactive, with many voices engaging in a dynamic and evolving atmosphere, and the writing is rarely a static, unchanging testament. Think of Web pages as conversations or something equally ephemeral and use this to your advantage.
The first reality of writing for the screen is that readers will provide instant feedback, whether you like it or not. If they disagree, catch you in a factual error, or feel strongly about what you have written, they will let you know. Thus, part of your writing must take into account that the document will be open to discussion, and that you are willing to engage in the discussion in a non-defensive, constructive fashion.
In order to create that environment, you need to let readers know clearly how they are supposed to provide their feedback. Don't make them figure it out for themselves. It will only frustrate an employee more if he or she has to seek out your e-mail address in the directory in order to respond to something in your document. You should also make it clear where employees can read the comments you have received, and your responses. Some ways to accommodate feedback and dialogue include:
It is important to keep the Web pages updated and to let your readers know how often the information is updated. As you get new information or insights, you will want to update your document. You should let employees know that it has been updated, and direct them to what has changed. This is particularly important if you are making a change based on employee feedback! You need to indicate the change without disrupting the flow of the text itself, without drawing attention to the mechanics of the update while sacrificing the employee's ability to read a coherent document that is easy to understand. Some ways to do this include:
Posted July 8, 1996
Revised July 15, 1996
Add a postscript to the page that lists the changes that have been made since the document was first posted. If this supplemental information is clearly identified, any employee can quickly match a change in the document to the postscript item that notes why the change was made.
Some of the documents that appear on an internal Web will require updating as a matter of routine. Such documents include financial reports, online publications, and maintenance and procedure manuals. If you know how often the document will change, you can indicate the schedule in a prominent place at the top of the page, like this:
This document will be updated on the 1st and the 15th of every month.
Then add the date the document was last updated.
For documents that change irregularly-such as a procedures manual-each section can include a date indicating when it was last revised. A nursing manual is a fine example. If a new technique is adopted by the hospital for discharging patients, at the bottom of the page in italics, a line can indicate:
Procedure updated July 22, 1996.
If your organization has not mandated a browser standard-if employees are using a variety of browsers-or even if you have multiple platforms, such as Windows and Macintosh, you should view your document on as many applicable browsers as possible to ensure that it will look the way it is supposed to regardless of the browser an employee may be using.
Another way to test your writing is to monitor who is reading it. The same software and services that work on the Internet's World Wide Web to track "hits" on a page will work internally. In fact, they often are more effective on intranets because you can be assured that every hit you get is a real employee; on the World Wide Web, it is difficult to distinguish a hit that represents a real pair of human eyes from a bot, spider, or agent that is out looking for new sites to add to an index. You also can analyze the server log files to monitor readership. By undertaking such an analysis, you can learn which employees are reading your document, which parts of your document are being read (and which parts employees are skipping), and even how long they are spending with each page.
You can draw some useful conclusions from this analysis. For example, is the audience for which the document was intended not accessing it? If not, can you deduce why-for example, are there no links from appropriate pages that would lead that audience to your document? If people are missing important pages, could it be because the navigation that would lead them to those pages is ineffective?
Unlike print, to which you are committed as soon as the paper leaves the press, you can make changes to Web pages that will make the pages more effective.
There are a number of ways to improve the usefulness and effectiveness of writing that appears online. Company policy will establish what kind of material is acceptable on the intranet, what kind of language is permitted, when acronyms should be spelled out and when they should be linked to additional information, and so forth. However, there are still other issues that need to be resolved, especially mechanical and visual concerns.
A point to consider is that you do want this material read, and not everyone wants to sit at their computer to do so. The paperless office is the ideal, but it is far from the reality. No matter how effective your document is as an online document, there are those employees who will simply print it out so they can stuff it in a briefcase and read it on the bus during the trip home. You should, therefore, make sure that your document will read well and be coherent as a printed document. If there are links to essential material, make sure that they are clearly identified and provide an option for users to print multiple items at once so that nothing is inadvertently skipped.
Another mechanical consideration to keep in mind when writing for the screen is the fact that people simply do not like to read long blocks of text on a screen. Generally, when people are online, they are looking for the information they need. It's an entirely different experience than settling back with a printed document. Bullet points make it easier for employees to scan the material to find just the right piece of data so they can get offline and go back to their jobs. Figure 7.5 shows a Web page in which information is displayed as narrative, the way it might appear in text, while Figure 7.6 shows the same text in bullet form.
Figure 7.5 : Information displayed as narrative.
There is a rich array of multimedia types available on the intranet. A document in print is limited to words and pictures, and (more often than not) the writer does not see what the designer incorporates as artwork until after the document is printed. On a Web page, the look of the page and its elements has as much to say about the information as the words, and writers need to learn to incorporate those elements to achieve the greatest possible impact. We'll address multimedia in more detail later in the book, but in terms of integrating multimedia with the written word, you should know that the following multimedia applications can be built directly into the Web page:
For a variety of reasons, you could end up opting to produce some (or much) of your intranet's documentation in formats other than the Web. Given the ability of various browsers to display everything from Microsoft Powerpoint presentation files to Adobe Acrobat PDF files-and given the limitations of some employees to access the Web yet receive a file attached to an e-mail message (such as those employees getting their information from outside the firewall)-these are valuable tools.
Many of the same rules that apply to writing for the Web can be translated to other forms of online communication, and are particularly important in the use of PDF files. Adobe's PDF format makes it easy to take publications that were designed to be distributed in print-vertical, columnar, with "jumps" from one page to the next-and dump call them online simply because a reader can view them electronically. As noted above, though, that which is created for paper necessarily has a different approach than that which is designed for the screen. At all costs, resist the temptation to turn print publications into a digital format and call it an electronic publication; it's not. You need to redesign your print publications so they will work on the screen. With Acrobat publications in particular (or their counterparts, Envoy and Common Ground), make sure each page fits on a single screen and that readers can easily navigate to the information in which they are interested.
If your organization is producing information in both print and digital format, this may seem like a lot of extra work. However, if you create a series of templates for your online version of the publication, it becomes a simple routine task to transfer information from the vertical, print-based format to the pre-formatted electronic format.
Writing content for intranet formats-including the Web, PDF, and other formats-differs from writing for print. When writing for the online formats, you need to consider organizational issues, style, and techniques that can't be translated to paper, such as hyperlinks and interactivity. Writing for the Web takes into account the fact that what people read is light, not matter. And writing for online formats involves a non-hierarchical approach to information in which readers can start anywhere they like, rather than at the beginning.
Writing for online formats also shares some characteristics with print. These similarities include the need for plain good writing and appropriate tone for the material, as well as consideration of the audience segment for which the material is intended.
Now that you are prepared to guide the development of original material for the internal Web-and the revision of appropriate existing copy -it's time to look at how this material comes together to form an actual online publication, which is the subject of Chapter 8