On reducing cognitive burdens
Contents
1. TO LEARN TO ACT TO BE AWARE TO GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE How well does this guideline apply Keeping it simple stupid or KISS was developed as a guideline for business correspondence not entertaining prose You can play around with this rule if you know you re amusing One idea at a time works best Disembed move or remove One meaningful action per instruction No more No extra explana tions either Just the action If you have something profound to say it will come out simply On the other hand if you are selling a cult use more clauses because they act like incense smoke to blind and ensnare Would you use complicated syntax when talking to a friend Probably not unless you were pontificating or lying See Bush and Campbell 1995 Creaghead and Donnelly 1982 Galitz 1985 Heckel 1984 Horton 1990 Isakson and Spyridakis 1999 Kilian 1999 Larkin and Burns 1977 Lynch and Horton 1997 Rayner Carlson and Frazier 1983 Roemer and Champanis 1982 Spyridakis 2000 208 Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup Blow Up Nominalizations and Noun Trains BACKGROUND Rescue the verb On the Web people feel impatient with any text that seems ambiguous or hard to understand Turning verbs like suggest and define into nouns like suggestion and definition may seem innocu ous but if you keep transforming actions into things your prose TNE MOVE ASE NOTES gets cl2. change the nominalization into a verb and discover a new subject For instance There is a development from our European office might be changed into Our European office has developed Untie the noun knot To compress a bunch of concepts into a single phrase profession als often chain together a series of nouns such as office design management worksheet user manual Unfortunately ordinary folks have trouble teasing apart the sequence figuring out which noun goes with which other one and what the whole shebang means They re often another form of jargon a shorthanding of longer concepts But clarity demands that the editor unpack the noun string Bush and Campbell 1995 Noun strings are often ambiguous because people can consider several nouns as a unit modifying something else but then recon sider and see several other nouns as a complete descriptive phrase getting an entirely different viewpoint For instance a reader might consider these interpretations Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup e The manual for people who use the worksheet that lets them manage the design of their office e The office copy of the manual explaining how to design the management of worksheet users e The manual for worksheet users who focus on design management in offices Of course without knowing more the reader could only guess which meaning was intended This kind of push me pull you process
3. different e not strong enough gt too weak e did not remember gt forgot One negative is bad but two or three will confuse anyone Avoid combining no not or never with verbs that give off negative vibes like avoid deny doubt exclude fail lack prevent or prohibit First the reader has to figure out what positive action may have been attempted or asserted Then the reader has to understand how the action got stopped And finally the not appears turning the stop action back on itself Beware too words that are implicitly neg ative such as unless however without against lacking e The cancellation form was not accepted by the server Please do not retry at this time unless the text in fields marked with red arrows has been erased e The filtering criteria you submitted have not been reject ed but failed to exclude any known sites To completely confuse your readers combine negatives with passive verbs and our dreaded nominalizations e Returns must not be sent unless a cancellation process has been refused e We re sorry but privacy concerns cannot be addressed individually except in non secure e mail transmissions If you must say NO say why Sometimes you just have to say No If you have to contradict an idiot deny a statement or fight against a misunderstanding go ahead But rush in afterward with a positive statement e Were not geeks We re just ordinary consumers like you e No surrender We
4. drives people right off your site EXAMPLES Before We re sorry but the product specification of the selected hardcopy output device lacks the request ed status indicator liquid crystal displays as well as the supply feed extension mechanism Before There is a need for annual testing of both untreated water and treated water for a determination of contaminant levels Before The system model security software made an investigation into the clock set violation breach Before The intention of the site development project team is to meet the beta deadline even if that means the excision of some features Before Then there was a review of the file format conversion module After We re sorry but the selected printer lacks two things you asked for the LCD display and an extra large paper tray After Every year we should test both treated and untreat ed water to determine the level of contaminants After The security software investigated the attempt to reset the system clock After Our project team intends to meet the beta dead line even if we have to drop some features After We then reviewed the module that converts our files to other formats 211 Hot Text Web Writing That Works See Bush amp Campbell 1995 Horton 1990 Price amp Korman 1993 Tarutz 1992 Waite 1982 Williams 1990 212 Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup Watch Out for Ambiguous Phras
5. on your monthly subscription 216 After You ll find that information on our home page as shown in the table In the System White Paper you ll In the Security Overview look for In the subsection on The Protocol Recommendations Next Our extension of this study Further Thoughts Previous The authors initial report Once a month we send you 12 rosebuds entirely coated with chocolate throughout your subscription Net Spirit The families in our cooperative make 100 Scottish cashmere apparel It creates kilts capes scarves sweaters pullovers blankets and throws These items are available direct from them through our secure ordering pages Click to see them The new window may have appeared right on top of the original page so that you can no longer see that frame Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup The families in our cooperative make 100 Scottish cashmere apparel We create kilts capes scarves sweaters pullovers blankets and throws You can buy these items direct from individual families through our cooperative s secure ordering pages The new page may have appeared right on top of the original page obscuring it AUDIENCE FIT If visitors want this TO HAVE FUN How well does this guideline apply Ambiguity may be part of the game Just make sure you signal your guests that you are being deliberately provocative not just lazy TO LEARN TO ACT A
6. sense of the time that of all the impossi bilities of action my proceeding to Cambridge on the very vaguest grounds that probably ever deter mined a residence there might pass for the least flagrant as I breathe over again at any rate the compar ative confidence in which I so moved I feel it as a confidence in the positive saving virtue of vague ness Could I but work that force as an ideal I felt it must see me through for the beauty of it in that form was that it should absolutely superabound I wouldnt have allowed either that it was vaguer to do nothing for in the first place just staying at home when every one was on the move couldnt in any degree show the right mark to be properly and perfectly vague one had to be vague about something mere inaction quite lacked the note it was nothing but definite and dull Henry James Notes of a Son and Brother Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup But writing in the passive voice turns that pattern on its head A passive sentence turns the object into a subject and deletes the true actor or pushes that person off into a prepositional phrase toward the end of the sentence Active The batter hit the ball Passive The ball was hit by the batter Some readers may actually encode the passive text in active voice to understand it Reading a passive sentence like The chocolate sauce was poured over the raspberry by the chef the mind evidently pauses to
7. translate that into The chef poured chocolate sauce over the raspberry Now the main actor has become the true subject of the sentence matching the mind s expectations and the object of her pouring has ended up where it belongs as the object of the verb And the active verb shows us what the lead actor does The chocolate sauce is no longer acting as if it were the person in charge This process of translation adds 25 to the time required to understand the sentence Not only do readers move more quickly through active voice text but they prefer it and feel more familiar with it Spyridakis 2000 Of course some minds just enjoy thinking about chocolate so those folks may not object to the split seconds devoted to reinter preting the sentence And in science engineering bureaucracies and academia the passive voice sounds sober and professional in research papers But online that paper mentality takes too many words and eats up too much thinking time If your users are just going to download and print a document you don t need to change the passive voice But if your audience will try to read the material online you should transform all those weak kneed passives into healthy active sentences 1 Make the actor the subject the batter 2 Change the verb to active voice from is hit by to hits 3 Move the object the ball after the verb 219 Hot Text Web Writing That Works Is is OK Occ
8. you can t play when you re making art you should go into accounting J Become a Pro Backup 229 Hot Text Web Writing That Works AUDIENCE FIT If visitors want this TO HAVE FUN TO LEARN TO ACT TO BE AWARE TO GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE How well does this guideline apply People who really really like to read are willing to immerse them selves in very long pages and prefer reading those to hopping about among arbitrarily short chunks On the other hand many people enjoy the breather they get when downloading the next short passage Play scrolling any way you like If you want someone to learn online the short chunks work best If you expect students to print and read off paper who cares how long the page is Out of sight out of action Instructions that scroll always lose people Try to get all the key steps in view at the same time If not work within two or three screens Scrolling is a religious issue Practice not getting self righteous pro or con Whatever you write in the first screen determines whether am willing to go on In most cases you should be able to say what you have to without going on and on and on See Black amp Elder 1997 Dillon 1994 IBM 1999 Farkas and Farkas 2000 Levine 1997 Lovelace and Southall 1983 Lynch 2000 Lynch and Horton 1997 Microsoft 2000 Morkes and Nielsen 1997 Nielsen 1997 1999f Rothkopf 1971 230
9. Hot Text Web Writing That Works Reduce the Number of Clauses Per Sentence 206 Blow Up Nominalizations and Noun Trains 209 Watch Out for Ambiguous Phrases a Reader Must Puzzle Over 213 Surface the Agent and Action so Users Don t Have to Guess Who Does What 218 204 Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup chapter 9 Idea 5 Reduce Cognitive Burdens Make a Positive Statement so People Understand Right Away without Having to Unpack a Nest of Negatives 222 Reduce Scrolling 226 Let Users Print or Save the Entire Document at Once to Avoid Reading Any More On screen 231 205 Hot Text Web Writing That Works Reduce the Number of Clauses Per Sentence Original Sentence BACKGROUND A clause is a miniature sentence because it contains a subject and a verb Robert Osgood 206 New Sentence Move or remove that who and which clauses Using a that who or which clause lets you embed one idea inside another and that s excellent Embedding a small sentence inside a larger one lets you show what is important and what is not emphasizing one thing demoting another while extending the reach of your accumulating sentence so that it expresses a complex thought But when you go too far you have to learn to disembed sentences Don t let minisentences crop up right in the middle of your main sentence When readers are moving along nicely in a
10. Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup Let Users Print or Save the Entire Document at Once to Avoid Reading Any More On screen BACKGROUND Our host has filled many note books with the sayings of our fathers as they came down to us This is the way of his people they put great store upon writing always there is a paper Four Guns Archive the printer friendly version If you have a lot of little chunks making up a long document offer people a separate page containing the whole document formatted just for printing That way users can save and print without hav ing to jump through dozens of links to see individual portions of the document Most users will save long documents to disk or print them rather than read extensive material online Lynch and Horton 1997 If the document is long and built as a linear sequence its natu ral medium is paper You are just delivering that document to the user s printer 231 Hot Text Web Writing That Works Long linear text documents really belong back on paper Your web site is just an archive for them Kilian 1999 See IBM 1999 Kilian 1999 Levine 1997 Lynch amp Horton 1997 Post Express your own idea on HotText yahoogroups com My Idea Subscribe HotText subscribe yahoogroups com Unsubscribe HotText unsubscribe yahoogroups com Post to HotText yahoogroups com Visit http www WebWritingThatWorks co
11. That seriously raises a little uncertainty Does this sentence mean that seriously overextending yourself can result in aches and pains Or does the author mean that overexertion must always lead to serious aches and pains To avoid unintended double entendres try these strategies e Watch out for adverbs and adjectives that might be taken to modify two different phrases one before and one after e Place an adverb near its verb e Place an adjective before its noun not after It s not a sandwich except in San Francisco In the Bay Area the It s It is a patty made out of chocolate wafers with ice cream sandwiched in between Delicious But online where no one knows what it is beware of pronouns People have to think a bit to see what the pronoun refers back to If you give them two or three possible referents the mind gets dizzy and the finger clicks away So be attentive whenever you realize you have just perpetrated a long sentence or paragraph carrying a lot of nouns and different pronouns such as Marketing mavens addressing their prime customers are vitally concerned about their goals and they are equally concerned with understanding how features relate to benefits and their own objectives Who s they Sorting out your own pronouns is a service to your readers Strategies e Repeat the darn noun At first the repeated noun sounds clunky even boring But as Gerry McGovern says Boring is beautiful on the Inter
12. asionally you have to define a term or create an equation Literature is news that stays news Ezra Pound ABC of Reading 1934 Mediocrity is a handrail Montesquieu Mes pens es 1755 The verb is acts as the equal sign That s OK The verb to be is not in itself passive The passive crops up when you turn the sub ject into a victim being operated on by the verb EXAMPLES Before After If disks are swapped with others or picked up at A virus could infect your disk if flea markets it must be noted that viruses could e You swap disks with friends be a problem on the disks the same is true if disks e You pick up disks at flea markets are received from people whose game software e You receive disks from people who has been downloaded from the Internet or if soft download games from the Internet ware gets loaded on the disk after being down e You download software from people you loaded from unknown sites don t know 220 Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup AUDIENCE FIT If visitors want this TO HAVE FUN TO LEARN TO ACT TO BE AWARE TO GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE How well does this guideline apply An occasional passive voice does no one any harm But get in the habit and you put your readers to sleep Passives are OK when there is no true subject Avoid them when you want to help students understand concepts processes or ruling principles Follow the guideline to be clea
13. bly deny the reality of freedom of speech Before However often the secure server has identified a break in it would not be advisable to prohibit administrative access Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup After We cannot agree We believe in freedom of speech After The administrator must always have access to the secure server even if a hacker has broken in AUDIENCE FIT If visitors want this TO HAVE FUN How well does this guideline apply Taking a negative position intrigues your readers But attack with gusto and not too many negatives TO LEARN TO ACT Negatives rarely work Teach pluses not minuses People need to know what to do Telling them what not to do risks confusion or worse people doing just what you told them not to do TO BE AWARE Try not thinking of fudge Negatives have their place when you must disabuse people of established notions But move quickly to what Is true TO GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE tune out A few negatives get a good argument going Too many and people See Boomer 1975 Chase amp Clark 1972 Clark amp Chase 1972 Dewer 1976 Hackos amp Stephens 1996 Herriot 1970 Horton 1990 Sammons 1999 Simpson amp Casey 1988 Whitaker amp Stacey 1981 Wickens 1984 Williams 1990 1994 225 Hot Text Web Writing That Works Reduce Scrolling Scrolling disorients some people You ve had the experie
14. es a Reader Must Puzzle Over XXKKK KKK KKK KKK KR aac ocatatatgececececeatatatetcecel PRIIS SSRIS RIIS RRISE KSSSE SS SSSI RESIS SIIRI 2RR RREIZ RIII SSSI To RIII RESESSIE ISSS POSERER oe amy BKK RRL BACKGROUND When a word can be taken two ways Sometimes we let a word fall between two phrases it could refer to either topic and the reader has to puzzle out which way we meant Figuring out an ambiguity is always a nuisance but online where people have less patience than they exhibit reading a news paper such uncertainties make people mad Anything that drives your readers to debate about what you might have intended dis tracts them from your point and risks heading them in the wrong direction like off your site The amount of thinking that the user has to put in just to move around the Web site already burdens the mind Add to that the Ti ies lik are barely recalled sequence of pages coming here and now you are Fruit flies like a banana f i Gravee Nari waving puzzle pieces in the readers faces saying Which one did I really mean To reduce what Morkes and Nielsen call cognitive load be concise scannable and unambiguous 213 Hot Text 214 Web Writing That Works Beware modifiers that point forward and backward Consider this sentence Overdoing your fitness routine seriously results in aches and pains
15. go ahead be inconsistent in life and poetry But when you write practical Web prose adopt Gertrude Stein s maxim A rose is a rose is a rose Changing the word you use to describe the rose could make peo ple wonder whether you have begun talking about some new flower altogether How can users follow a procedure if the terminology changes if you call something a screen one time and a window the next It s not the user s job to figure out what you mean It s your job to make it obvious Henning 2001d 215 Hot Text Web Writing That Works If you call a gizmo a stylus here don t start referring to the same thing as a pen If you use the word user to refer to a consumer in one para graph don t switch in the next paragraph and write user when you really mean developer Adopt a controlled vocabulary a list of terms your team agrees to use consistently throughout the site By predetermining the terms that make up a controlled vocabulary and using those terms to describe your site s content you can minimize the negative effects that variants synonyms and various other annoyances can have on your site and its users Rosenfeld 1999 EXAMPLES Before You ll find that information at the top as shown in the table below If you go forward you ll On the next level up look for Below this section Next Previous We put 12 rosebuds coated with chocolate entirely
16. ld not scroll Microsoft 2000 But if you have a long list of links that form a single conceptual unit such as a list of football teams or cities you can allow scroll ing because once people figure out the organizational scheme they know how to troll for the link they want When scrolling is OK Destination pages can go long When users find the first screen interesting they will deign to scroll through a few more screens of text But not many Users will almost never scroll through very long pages Nielsen 1999f Try rewriting to make the whole page shorter Consider breaking the piece up into a series of shorter chunks linked together If you decide that the piece really hangs together as a sin gle unit show the whole article on one page Users may dislike scrolling but they hate waiting for another download Content pages should contain one conceptual unit of content In general people prefer to scroll to continue a single unit of content like an article skit or short story rather than click from page to page of an article Microsoft 2000 If you have a page that people will want to read at length a scrolling page is tolerable But you might provide a printer friendly version as we suggest in the next guideline Before Net Spirit Human Style Genres Topic Menu About our Interface A lot of people see interfaces as just cosmetic you know coming afterward putting a pretty face on
17. ll long distances and to remember the organization of things that have scrolled off screen Lynch and Horton 1997 Some people don t scroll at all When Jakob Nielsen first studied users back in the early days of the Web he found that only 10 of them would scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up 1996 Year by year more users are willing to scroll at times But many don t bother to scroll below the top of the page Many participants want a Web page to fit on one screen Morkes and Nielsen 1997 Pack the top The most important part of your site is the top of the page That s the only area you can be sure your users will see So show it off Avoid requiring users to scroll in order to determine page contents Users should be able to recognize immediately whether the subject of any given page interests them IBM 1999 Move up any information that you absolutely want to get across For presentations that must grab people s attention to be successful don t make the page longer than the window Levine 1997 227 Hot Text 228 Web Writing That Works No scrolling menus please The point of a menu is to let people choose between various options When some of the options disappear or never appear the users have to guess remember what they scrolled by and they may make the wrong choice and end up on irrelevant or dud pages Most navigation pages shou
18. m 232
19. nce You scroll down down down and discover you ve gone past the topic you were looking for So you scroll up up up and go past it again Plus once you ve located and read the topic you may not be sure where you are on the full page Excessive scrolling can disorient computer users Information that has scrolled off the screen is invisible and therefore harder to remember Lynch 2000 Readers tend to remember where topics occur within the layout of a printed page That memory is reinforced by the fact that an item stays put as the person reads through the page But on the 226 For most people interviewed paths were the predominant city ele ments although their importance varied according to the degree of familiarity with the city People with least knowledge of Boston tended to think of the city in terms of topography large regions gener alized characteristics and broad directional relationships Kevin Lynch The Image of the City Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup Web scrolling moves the item pushing it out of sight leaving users uncertain how long the page may be and where the item may fall within its layout Users can only see how the item relates to its nearest neighbors With a fuzzier image of the item s place in the overall structure of the page people have more trouble remembering the point Very long Web pages tend to be disorienting because they require the user to scro
20. net because the Internet is a very functional place e Move the pronoun so it is close to the noun referred to One keeps saying the same thing but the fact that one has to say it is eery Elias Canetti The Human Province Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup e Use the pronoun only one way in the sentence If you find three uses of it make sure it always refers to the same noun e Make the noun explicit Don t imply a general topic and then refer broadly to it You re making readers guess what you mean and they may guess wrong Don t point offstage On the Web you can t assume you know where guests have come from so suggesting they go back to a page they have never seen may seem odd or raise unpleasant thoughts even anxiety in some guests Watch out for relative directions particularly when borrow ing material that was originally written for paper where forward above below and back all have real meaning Describe the subject of the page or use absolute direc tions Jutta Degener quoted by Levine 1997 Ixnay on the creative variations In a poem designed to be read on paper we may struggle to find new words to describe the same object giving the reader new per spectives new slants and new overtones In literature consistency stinks Oscar Wilde called it the last refuge of the unimaginative Aldous Huxley said The only completely consistent people are dead So
21. or B TO BE AWARE Half your effort is simply avoiding ambiguity Don t make someone pause in mid air wondering whether you mean Poetry and parables work on several levels referring to different planes of experience But on each plane the best lines are unambigu ously powerful TO GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE In a direct exchange people overlook accidental ambiguities if they think they know what you mean Strangers though may choose the worst possible interpretation and send you flames See Fowler Aaron and Limburg 1992 Henning 2001d Horton 1990 Kilian 1999 Levine 1997 McGovern 2001 Morkes and Nielsen 1998 Price and Korman 1993 Rosenfeld 1999 Tarutz 1992 Williams 1994 217 Hot Text Web Writing That Works Surface the Agent and Action so Users Don t Have to Guess Who Does What BACKGROUND Write actively to speed people s understanding People habitually think in terms of characters carrying out actions that affect objects or other people So readers expect this pattern in sentences Character or actor Subject Action Verb Object Direct object Williams says readers think prose is clear when 1 The subjects of the sentences name the cast of characters 2 The verbs that go with those subjects name the cru cial actions those characters are part of Williams 1990 218 The interest to myself would seem to have been as I recover the
22. otted Readers struggle to figure out who does what because learned to dance the prose seems full of objects with only a few fuzzy actions Alexander Pope True ease in writing comes from art not chance An Essay on Criticism Compare Our general suggestion is that your definition of the goal should probably have greater precision We suggest that you define the goal more precisely Which sentence can you understand more quickly The second one probably It tells you who is talking and makes clear what they want you to do It s more precise When you turn a verb into a noun you are nominalizing a horrible thing to do An obvious indication that you have just 209 Hot Text 210 Web Writing That Works nominalized a verb is that the word gets longer often by adding a Latinate suffix like tion ization or worse But nominalizations occur whenever you make a verb do a noun s work even when it s the same word Compare Upon the receipt of our product please conduct a review of the contents of the box When you receive our product please review the con tents of the box Don t abuse a verb by making it act like a noun e When the nominalization trails after a nondescript verb as in may register improvement get rid of the verb and turn the nominalization into the main verb may improve e When the nominalization follows a phrase such as There is lop off that phrase
23. r Better yet write in the imperative Tell people what to do Give orders Some passives reflect reality The person does nothing but is trans formed Still keep the passives to a minimum Somehow folks know you are covering up exaggerating or lying when you overuse the passive they ll say you sound just like a bureaucrat See Broadbent 1978 Flower Hayes and Swarts 1983 Henning 2001c Herriot 1970 Horton 1990 Kilian 1999 Kintsch 1993 Miller 1962 Spyridakis 2000 Tarutz 1992 Williams 1990 221 Hot Text Web Writing That Works Make a Positive Statement so People Understand Right Away without Having to Unpack a Nest of Negatives BACKGROUND Negatives slow people down Faced with a negative readers must often translate it into a posi tive statement to figure out what it means Comprehension suffers when the reader must make a logical reversal such as when translating the statement The switch is not off to get the meaning The switch is on Si d Casey 1988 The world s as ugly ay as sin yan Spa Been a oc And almost as delightful f i Frederick Locker Lampsoh Negative words especially two in a row require The Jester s Plea more effort from the reader to understand causing information overload Sammons 1999 222 Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup Do the translation for your guests e not many gt few e not the same gt
24. re going to go on fighting for the environment 223 Hot Text Web Writing That Works EXAMPLES Take a positive stance Making a positive statement takes more imagination Instead of telling people Don t operate in an unsafe manner you have to think what safe operation consists of That takes more effort than merely waving your hand and saying Don t get in trouble But if you can come up with concrete actions that users can take you increase the likelihood that they will follow your advice Which sentences would you find easier to act on Negative Don t put tools on the floor Don t overload the power supply with nonstandard voltages Overboiling could have a negative impact on taste and texture Positive Put tools on the table Use only 220 volt power Boil for 7 minutes then drain for best taste and tex Before After Caution do not reject this offer to cancel unless Please reconsider your resignation We want you as you have already discounted the many benefits a member and hope you value the many benefits of membership of membership To stay a member click Stay Before After Except when verification of income cannot be made To make sure your application is approved because of lack of documentation applications will please send us documentation so we can verify not be denied your income 224 Net Spirit Before ture We cannot agree with those negative people who unaccounta
25. sen tence but encounter a clause starting with that who or which right in the middle gosh they space out make mistakes in understand ing and fail to recall the information inside those relative clauses Complex syntax distracts the user from the task and taxes his or her memory Horton 1990 Remember that the matter of wordiness is entirely secondary to the matter of how your sentence sounds When longer phrases suit the rhythm of a sentence better than short ones the longer ones are a better choice Net Spirit Human Style Genres Become a Pro Backup Readers seem to be built to understand one idea at a time They get confused when they think they have grasped the general sub ject of a sentence but then hear something different Now they must hold the original thought in reserve while contemplating a new smaller idea after which they must remember the original subject and apply that to the verb that emerges just to understand who does what So don t let the relative clauses get between the real subject and the real verb Webster s Dictionary of English Usage verb are Strategies to handle a clause standing between a subject and a e Remove the clause altogether and turn it into a separate sentence The risk sounding a little dumb e Transform the clause into an introductory if or when clause Move the clause to the end of the sentence where people can digest it because better it no longer dis
26. the whole product but not ours Our interface is not an afterthought A lot of engineers talk about interface design as if it is all decided in Redmond whatever Microsoft says we do that and voila we have an interface But that is not true You don t have to do what Bill says We are more like Mac designers We see interface as a major part of the e product We work just as hard early developing an interface that will be fun as we do developing the combinatorial math that underlies the feature set We see the interface as a kind of artistic environment The user is visiting us for the first time maybe and we want to show that we encourage exploration play That is why everything is one click away Click and go Also everything is reversible No matter what you do you can undo Now some of the pros scoff at our interface because it makes the process well too easy Tough For us if you can t play when you re making art you should go into accounting Screen Limit After Lissa Topic Menu About our Interface Our interface is not an afterthought We work just as hard developing an interface as we do developing the combinatorial math that underlies the feature set We see the interface as a kind of artistic environment The user is visiting us for the first time and we want to show that we encourage exploration Everything is one click away Click and go For us if
27. tracts from the flow of the main sentence EXAMPLES Before Some customers who have already been identified by our system as repeat customers may want to see their wish list on the first page The preferences that they chose earlier must be recognized too and acted on by the content management system Before Now you can shop for the same items that you always liked in our paper catalog on the Web using our online shopping service Before Of all the areas of uncertainty that an asthma suf ferer encounters in the research literature that has developed over the years as pharmaceutical com panies and the National Science Foundation NSF After Our system identifies repeat customers They may want to see their wish list on the first page Also our content management system ought to act on the preferences that these customers set earlier After Now you can shop online for the same items that you always liked in our paper catalog After Does the flu vaccine cause asthma attacks We don t know despite extensive research by pharmaceutical companies and the National Science Foundation NSF 207 Hot Text Web Writing That Works invest in clinical studies as to the effect of influenza vaccinations on asthma no question that scientists address seems as difficult to resolve as the concern that the vaccine may actually cause asthma attacks AUDIENCE FIT If visitors want this TO HAVE FUN
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