Your words are virtually there
Web Text = Content + Interface
As writers, we often pay attention to what we are trying to say, somehow crafting the words to express the truth, as we see it. Meaning means more to us than navigation. So we turn out text that, we believe, is rich content.
But our words often dominate the controls people have to use to move through the electronic world:
- Words on menus
- Words in dialog boxes
- Words in warnings
- Words that appear when we hover over a tool.
For all the icons, the graphic user interface is still an extremely verbal medium: but people perceive this very reliance on words as annoying, restrictive, confusing, ambiguous, slow.
Words are caught between meaning and motion. How does that double bind affect your prose?
Bonus
What will the web do to my text? (Full chapter from Hot Text in PDF, 700K, or 12 minutes at 56K)