Web Style & Paper Style

I found a lot of similarities between web style and paper style, the most obvious being clarity and concision. These are two elements that we have discussed extensively throughout the semester and they are again reiterated in the web style guides. I would say the clarity and concision may almost be more important with web style, since web surfers expect to obtain information quickly and easily. Flowery language would disrupt this and slow the entire internet experience. When reading papers or books you become absorbed in what you're reading. When visiting web sites, you are more interested in the overall experience. Web surfing is a much more multi-tasking experience than reading a text. If you get bored when you're web surfing, you can instantly visit thousands of new pages, ones where your information can be more easily obtained.

I also noticed that unity is important with both web and paper style. With papers, we call this a thesis. With the internet, it's a topic of site theme. In papers, it's important to restate your thesis throughout your paper (in different words of course, to minimize redundancy). Similarly with web sites, it's important to have a common topic string to bring unity through your site. Use headers and a table to contents to remind viewers what they're learning and to keep them on task. This works for single-topic web sites, but these days, web sites contain multiple pieces of information. If your web site contains a multitude of topics, there are also other ways of unifying the information. While papers are limited to words alone to maximize unity, the many pages of a single web site should share a unified look. This way, viewers are reminded that they haven't strayed.


The biggest difference between web and paper style, in my opinion, is how papers are considered a unified whole, while web sites are taken in bits and pieces. When reading a paper, we must read through the entire thing, start to finish, in order to take away meaning. That is simply the way that papers are organized. Web sites, however, are broken into many pieces where people can select what's relevant to them to research. This saves time, simplifies and works well for web sites where the goal is usually to obtain some fact or piece of information. People don't have to sift through other sentences like when reading a paper when they're only looking for one specific topic. It makes things easier and in a world where we expect information instantly at our fingertips, web sites are the way to go. With web sites information is still organized but typically just not as thorough.

Either way, both means of writing have their benefits. Papers convey points, they're persuasive, they're informative. Web sites provide facts quickly and efficiently. Both work well and both follow many of the same style rules, where clarity and concision rule.