Digital Guyana

The first part of this specialism on good content focused on writing skills. I came up with four exercises which were designed to get the participants thinking about best practice in terms of writing for the web.

Exercise 1. Titles and taglines.

I split the group up into pairs and gave them three website scenarios (see below). I then asked the pairs to come up with titles and taglines for the websites. As previously explained in my workshop on content skills, a website’s title should be relevant and descriptive – and hopefully memorable too – and a tagline is important because it helps further explain what your website is all about. So the purpose of this exercise was to hammer home these points while getting the participants to think creatively about websites.

1. A friend of yours is starting a blog on nightlife and music in Georgetown. Can you help him come up with a title and tagline for his new site?

2. Adventure junkies, a new Guyanese tour company offering treks to Kaieteur Falls and more has just launched. It aims to attract a younger clientele with the promise of adventure and bargain prices. Can you come up with a catchy tagline for its new website?

3. The ministry of education wants to develop a new website which will help foster web development skills among young people in Guyana. The site will offer free tutorials on HTML, blogging, content skills, picture editing and plenty of links to free open source software. Can you help them come up with a name and tagline for the website?

The pairs then reported back to the group and me and together we critiqued their titles and taglines.

Exercise 2. Shortening paragraphs.

Because it’s physically harder to read online and people scan web pages more quickly than they would printed material (scannability), in general shorter paragraphs work better online. So to get the participants more used to the process of editing down and cutting out words I asked them to shorten these opening paragraphs from the following news stories by five to ten words:

Bald penguin given wetsuit to prevent sunburn
When Ralph the penguin lost his feathers it looked like he wouldn’t be able to swim with his friends at Marwell Wildlife – until he was fitted for a mini wetsuit to stop him getting sunburn.

Chinese women confuse immigration officers after cosmetic surgery
A group of Chinese women who travelled to South Korea for cosmetic surgery baffled immigration officers on their return home when their new looks did not match their passport photos.

Michael Jackson fans flock to see Egyptian model ‘lookalike’
Michael Jackson fans are flocking to a Chicago museum to see a 3,000 year old Egyptian model which looks remarkably like the late king of pop.

Exercise 3. Headline writing.

I then asked the participants to come up with headlines for these news stories. I stressed the importance of brevity, descriptiveness and relevance – clever and cryptic headlines don’t work so well online due to search engine optimisation and scannability.

I asked the participants to show me the headlines they came up with and we had a quick chat about them. I then revealed what the actual headlines were and explained why they were worked well as online headlines.

Exercise 4. Splitting up paragraphs.

Because readers are put off by long paragraphs – even more so online due to scannability and the fact that it’s harder to read on a computer screen – I came up with an exercise that would get the participants thinking about splitting up paragraphs.

I provided them with a travel feature on Guyana which I had removed all the paragraph breaks from and asked the participants to insert thir own paragraph breaks. We then went through the feature together discussing why the writer had put paragraph breaks in at certain points and seeing if they coaleasced with where they had put their paragraph breaks in.