Quick Tip: Thinking in Hypertext

Writing for the web isn’t any more difficult than regular writing. In fact, bloggers aren’t bound by any rules outside those that define good–and perhaps journalistic–writing. But your audience has come to expect more from texts written for the web. The key to pleasing your readers lies in the way you craft your hypertext. It’s a skill that everyone involved in new media needs to develop. Read on to find out what’s key to writing good hypertext.

From grade school to college, we’re taught that the emphasis in a sentence lies with the verb. Verbs push the sentence along and give life and vigor to your writing. With hypertext, nouns steal a bit of the thunder from verbs. They become associative links to more information about what you’re presenting; in essence, links become actions in and of themselves that take readers deeper into the subject matter.

Usability is the impetus for emphasizing nouns in web writing. Readers of web content expect links. Links provide detail and make text scannable. Just remember not to make an action into an action; in other words, avoid turning verbs into links. Jakob Nielsen suggests avoiding verb-based links (i.e., “click here”) because verbs don’t carry any information about what you’re linking to.

Here’s an example from my last post:

For mouse-and-keyboard-style prototyping, my weapon of choice is OmniGraffle, but I keep Photoshop in an ankle holster.

Readers know that the word OmniGraffle will take them to more information about OmniGraffle. Obvious, right? And if they are scanning the document and see a link to OmniGraffle, they can decide quickly if they want to know more about the topic. The noun informed their decision, whereas a vague “click here” would have sent them hunting down the target of the action.

What elevates web writing to a craft is the author’s ability to identify how much information his or her audience needs. The goal is to show people your train of thought without revealing too much or being too obvious. Leaving out the link to OmniGraffle in the above example would have short-changed the reader, while linking to Photoshop’s product page, the Wikipedia entry for mouse or keyboard, and a Dictionary.com entry for prototyping would have overwhelmed him or her. The focus of the paragraph was OmniGraffle, and that’s why the name of the application received special attention.

So the next time you find yourself putting the finishing touches on a blog post, be sure to question whether you’ve provided your readers with an adequate level of detail via external sources. They’ll appreciate your effort. Good luck, and happy linking.