Product Description

Attention, Web writers! This book will show you how to craft prose that grabs your guests' attention, changes their attitudes, and convinces them to act. You'll learn how to make your style fast, tight, and scannable. You'll cook up links that people love to click, menus that mean something, and pages of text that search engines rank high. You'll learn how to write great Web help, FAQs, responses to customers, marketing copy, press releases, news articles, e-mail newsletters, Webzine raves, or your own Web resume. Case studies show real-life examples you can follow. No matter what you write on the Web, you'll see how to personalize, build communities, and burst out of the conventional with your own honest style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #269753 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From the Back Cover

Attention, Web writers! This book will show you how to craft prose that grabs your guests' attention, changes their attitudes, and convinces them to act. You'll learn how to make your style fast, tight, and scannable. You'll cook up links that people love to click, menus that mean something, and pages of text that search engines rank high. You'll learn how to write great Web help, FAQs, responses to customers, marketing copy, press releases, news articles, e-mail newsletters, Webzine raves, or your own Web resume. Case studies show real-life examples you can follow. No matter what you write on the Web, you'll see how to personalize, build communities, and burst out of the conventional with your own honest style.

About the Author

We are professional Web writers and editors. We regularly coach other writers, showing how to tailor their prose for e-mail, Web pages, and discussions. We focus on text, not design or tags. If you have to write text that will go up on the Web, we're talking to you. We have written for the Internet for the last seven years, so we talk from real experience¿and affection. We love the spirit of the Net.

We come out of a background in journalism (writing for magazines such as Esquire, Harper's, Reader's Digest, and TV Guide), technical communication (writing and consulting with an A-to-Z of high tech firms), art (conceptual art in New York), TV and radio (dozens of interviews, and our own shows).

Along the way, we've written 24 books for major publishers and hundreds of articles for Web sites. Our consulting clients include such firms as America Online, Apple, Broderbund, Cadence, Canon, Cisco, Coupons.com, Disney's Family.com, Epson, eToys, FileMaker, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and HP.com, Hitachi, IBM, KBKids.com, Ketchum, Kodak, Los Alamos National Labs, Lotus, Matsushita, Middleberg Euro, Mitsubishi, Nikon, Ogilvy, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Relational, Ricoh, Sprint, Sun, Symantec, Visa, Xerox, and Zycad.

Jonathan has taught writing at New Mexico Tech, New York University, Rutgers, University of New Mexico, and the Extension programs of the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Stanford. Lisa was the Features Editor at KBKids.com from startup days to $80 million merger; she writes a weekly Internet column, ShopTalk, for Coupons.com. She frequently appears on TV and radio.

We live in an adobe house in the woods along the Rio Grande as it flows through New Mexico. Our sons, Ben and Noah, take the Web for granted, but prefer football.

Customer Reviews

Why wasn't hot text included in English class?...Essential
The most practical book EVER on writing for the web, and any other type of writing that you will need during your existence.

That's the impact this book has had on me.

This is the book that I have always looked for to improve my writing. The beauty is that you will learn how to structure your writing according to context.

So if you want to write for the web, help files, to appeal to a technical audience or to individuals who just want to read for fun, this book tells you how to. It even suggests very useful and down to earth templates that make sense.

Add to this the fact that the author is knowledgeable in information design and architecture, and you are flying for the web as a content manager!

Excellent as a guide or reference
I read this online with the Safari service but unfortunately my memory is not good enough to go into all the details. However I was impressed at the scope of situations covered and the layout is brilliant, both to read from cover to cover and then to later use as a reference (how do I write a good submenu again?). This is what I will be doing when I get my physical copy.

There are plenty of examples of "before" and "after" texts and, if you like, you can have a go at rewriting the bad examples to see if you picked up on the suggestions. Each section is short and easy to digest. At the end of each section is a table that shows how the style applies different audiences.

Hot Text is suitable for everyone intending to write for the web or organise a website. It also has some indirect ideas for developers deploying or implementing their own content management systems, such as creating reusable text objects. Recommended.