Writing for the web can be very different to writing for print. Visitors to your webpages will not be reading the text in the same way as they might read a leaflet or brochure. Instead they will be scanning the text, picking out key words and phrases, and trying to gauge the meaning of the content in as short a time as possible.
Imagine you’re driving past a billboard at 60mph in the car. You can only take in a limited amount of information and there’s no time to mentally process any complicated wording. Whilst the window of opportunity for a webpage is not quite so narrow, you need to bear in mind that your readers might be racing through your content rather than reading and digesting every carefully crafted word.
We need to adapt our writing style accordingly. We don’t want to confuse our readers by using words which are ambiguous, difficult to understand, or which act as obstacles to providing a clear message or straightforward navigation.
With this in mind, we’ve listed below some words that you should avoid using as these reduce the readability of our content.