The Long Form
May 20th, 2009Design, UI, Web Design
“You can’t do long-form writing online.”
Really? It’s 2009 and we’re still having this conversation?
The human brain is extraordinarily well adapted for associative thinking. It helped ensure the survival of our ancient ancestors. Even lacking direct empirical experience of a danger, they were able to piece together the puzzle from snatches of previously acquired data. (Enter predator: “Woah. Never seen that one before. Big claws? Check. Nasty fangs? Uh-huh. Run like hell? You bet.”)
It’s also, unfortunately, what leads us to constantly ascribe properties and biases from an old medium to a new one.
So here we find ourselves, well over a decade into this newfangled thing called the Web, with the prevailing folk wisdom about writing for it too oft unexamined.
A modest proposal.
Reading a candid, public back and forth between the print and online camps of a major publication once revered for its progressive technical stance, I very nearly went apoplectic (and let the above tweet fly). Even while fighting for their piece of the pie, online writers and editors implicitly ceded the point as if it were a given, in a conversation that largely conflated reporting formats and business models with writing styles: long-form writing is somehow assumed to be the domain of print only.
It went largely unarticulated, but there it was. Again. The base assumption lurking under it all. It’s palpable as you roll through those comments.
But it’s not like there isn’t solid data informing us to the contrary.
Late last year, Michael Meyers managed to buck the trend in the November/December 2008 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. In his article “Surface Routines”, he cited the results of the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack ‘07 study, which examined the habits of both loyal print and online newspaper readers, to challenge the widely held assumptions anew.
Since the original article is now behind a pay wall (an irony and anxiety for another discussion) here’s a sampling of the conclusions drawn from the data:
Web readers were more selective in the stories they chose, but once they found what they wanted, they read a substantially higher percentage of text than their print counterparts—a result that was true across all story lengths. Rather than running from words, Web users tended to be more textually based, and typically entered a story through a headline rather than a photo.
In fact, all of the differences between the actions of print and online readers in [the study] could be far more easily attributed to the navigational structure of a news Web site than to the mysterious force of a new medium.
And in case that didn’t package things neatly enough, Meyers continues:
The study proved the obvious but still anxiously held point that the Web is capable of delivering stories of any length and complexity. It also proved that people are still interested in long-form content—even people who choose to read the news online.
Bottom line? It’s a bald fallacy of presumption to hold that presenting text on a webpage ipso facto induces peripatetic behavior in your audience. The content itself, and the design used to present it, are the leading factors in shaping success. Not pixels or points. The hands that matter are those of the writer and the designer. If you’re a Web designer, you have incredible power (and a responsibility) to help further the case for this medium.
No more lazy assumptions.
David Sleight is a web designer living and working in New York City, and the Deputy Creative Director of BusinessWeek.com
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Comments
Karina May 20th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
For what it’s worth, I tend to do exactly what the article suggested: I look until I find what I need, and then I sit and will read the whole thing. I may bounce around quite a bit until I find it, but that’s indicative of navigation and a usually unclear process of how to go about finding it.
As a designer in training, as it were, I’m very interested to see what others say about this matter. I believe long text is just fine — but I’m curious about the how. How to make it easy to read, accessible, and (interesting content supposedly a given) worth sitting down to focus on.
drew May 20th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
A great comment I enjoyed from this other post about the “long form” was:
Design for Long-Form Web Writing May 22nd, 2009 at 11:26 am
[...] “You can’t do long-form writing online.” [...]
Shaw August 25th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I have a hard time staring at a computer screen for long periods of time.
Despite this, I still read plenty of longer stories online. Especially if they really grab my attention. The convenience of accessibility and price (usually free) outweighs my preference for the printed word.
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