I’m reading a good book called Letting Go of the Words, by Ginny Redish.

This is a really good book for anyone charged with writing on the Web. In fact, it’s a must-read for anyone with a website or blog. If you’re a fan of usability and you’d like to improve your site’s performance with better writing, definitely get this book.

Top 10 Web Writing Tips

Even though Redish makes a big point that on the Web people are skimmers and scanners and most people won’t read every word, she does give excellent advice in Chapter 8 called "Tuning Up Your Sentences." Here are 10 writing tips that I wholeheartedly endorse:

Communication is complicated. Presenting with visuals is a necessary skill in today's business environment. Having the tools at hand to know what contributes to a great presentation is the foundation for success.

The proper use of these multimedia visual aids is still a critical item to making a lasting impression upon your audience. While the visual is important, the presentation skills of the visual are just as important. Here we will walk you through some great tips and also provide the basics for the use and introduction of visual aids.

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts, and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project, and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative, and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data.

So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we’ve never thought before?

Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization,

Three-dimensional charts may be a little more eye-catching and dynamic than their 2-D counterparts (it's an Avatar world, baby), but data visualization blogger Stubborn Mule explains why you should consider junking 3-D charts, or at least why you shouldn't trust pyramid charts.

The author points out how people (and publications, for that matter) often incorrectly employ pyramid charts to produce an inaccurate representation of the information, focusing in on this chart and why its use of the pyramid chart misses the mark:

We all make mistakes running our websites. However, the nature of those mistakes varies depending on the size of your company. As your organization grows, the mistakes change. This post addresses common mistakes among large organizations.

Most of the clients I work with are large organizations: universities, large charities, public sector institutions and large companies. Over the last 7 years, I have noticed certain recurring misconceptions among these organizations. This post aims to dispel these illusions and encourage people to face the harsh reality.

Plagiarists rely upon the anonymity and the vastness of the Internet to hide their activities. Almost always, they know what they’re doing is wrong (at least morally) and though they seem very bold about their activities, they are betting that you won’t learn about their misuse of your work.

What plagiarists don’t realize is that the same tools that make it easy for them to find works to steal also make it easy for you, the copyright holder, to retrace their steps and catch them. Because, even though the Internet is vast, it’s so well indexed that finding plagiarism is a very easy task.

How do you get online visitors to take interest in your products or services? Write about things they care about.

Most would say that’s brain-dead obvious. Yet, it seems 90% of websites miss the mark completely.

The problem: self-absorbed web content. The cause: self-absorbed copywriters and business owners.

To engage prospects and turn them into customers, you need to appeal to the visitor’s self-interest — not yours.

Welcome to the photoshop hall of shame courtesy of Newsweek entitled, "Unattainable Beauty" (Click Here). It's likely that you heard about the Ralph Lauren fiasco just a few months ago. It's no surprise that Ralph Lauren's ad of a woman cut down to absurbly thin proportions makes the list.

But, unfortunately, he isn't alone. There are a slew of advertisers who photoshop men and women's bodies to unrealistically thin proportions. You may be surprised by who you find in this photomontage. It isn't just celebrities and supermodels. There is a famous news anchor, a male (yes, I said men are photoshopped too) and a musican. No one seems to escape the airbrush.

Back in 1997, Jakob Nielsen looked at how people read web content (basically, they scan it) and argued web writing should

• highlight keywords (often using hypertext links)
• use straight, clear headlines and subheads
• deliver one idea per paragraph
• cut word count to half that of conventional writing
• employ bulleted lists.

Many web writers, whether they’ve read Nielsen’s advice or not, use these practices because readers respond to them. The impulse to scan is a good thing because readers’ impatience inspires economy among writers.

At the same time, people are mastering more kinds of writing. Other technologies that grew more popular this decade required a different mode of expression: Instant messaging invited a breezy, fast-thinking tone; blog comments (again, the thoughtful ones) sharpened our debate skills; Twitter enforced even more economy onto our words. In all of these, we were nudged toward something all writers aspire to: a strong, distinct voice.

In twelve years of running digital copywriting agency Sticky Content, there are a few words and phrases I've grown to hate with a passion. If I had my way, I'd ban them from all websites and for some sound commercial reasons, too.