Are you reading this on a Droid? On an iPhone? On some other diminutive device being introduced even as I write this? Knowing that you could be gives me pause. The smartphone has become a primary reading device.[1]Â So, unless you write nothing but lost-cat posters destined for telephone poles, or other print pieces that no one will ever upload to the Web, you have little choice but to join me in grappling with this question: what must writers do differently to accommodate the small screen?
The answer, I believe, is … nothing.
Of course, mobile technologies require different formatting. Weâve all struggled to read a page intended for the big screen, pinching it and spreading it and pushing it around on a screen the size of a business card. When we then discover a mobile version of the site, or when an app like Wikipanion reformats it like magic, we love the ease of reading the same content optimized for that itty-bitty screen. A lot can be done with presentation.[2]
But Iâm not talking about presentation. Iâm talking about text. Iâm talking about your words, whichâsooner or later, like it or notâwill end up displayed in someoneâs palm.
When it comes to text, todayâs writers (which is to say, writers for the small screen) need to do the same things that writers have always done: cut, add, organize, and experiment. In this post, I talk about each in turn. But first, I want to dispel the myth that writers in the small-screen era should âkeep it short.â
The Short-Sightedness of Short
Lots of people are talking about the need to write lessâto keep it shortâfor mobile devices. Todayâs readers, weâre told, suffer from âinfobesityâ; they âwant less and less content.â[3] We supposedly live in an âera of brevity,â with our brains ârewiredâ in favor of short text.[4]
The problem is, short has no meaning. If I hand you a piece of string and say, âMake it short,â where do you cut? You canât know. You have to understand who needs to do what with the stringâand even then you donât want to cut the string short. You want to cut it just right.
Think of writing as string cutting. Instead of aiming for short, aim for economical:Â the right length. Five words can be too many. Five thousand can be too few. The right length, even for the small screen, depends on âthe context the reader brings,â as technical communicator Tom Johnson points out.[5]
We need to ask the same questions today that writers have always needed to ask: who will do what with the information? And how much do they already know? Until you do the work of answering these questions, you canât make good decisions about what to include and what to leave out, and any effort to streamline your content âdegenerates into making sentences shorter.â[6]Â So says JoAnn Hackos, who has spent decades teaching professionals about minimalist writingâwriting that delivers no more (and no less) than whatâs needed. I love her word degenerates. If your writing degenerates into a quest for shortness, you risk leaving readers puzzling over âcryptic terminologyâ and âunnecessary brevity.â[7]
Even that master of minimalism in fiction writing, Ernest Hemingway, famous for stories we call short, warns against seeking brevity for its own sake. His âiceberg theoryâ of writing makes clear that leaving things out requires discernment:
If a writer ⊠knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knowsâŠ. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.[8]
In other words, when your inner guru (or your boss) chants, âKeep it short,â fire back (if only to yourself), âMake it as short as possible and as long as necessary.â
Tips for Cutting
When you cut, do so more aggressively and empathetically than ever. As Web-usability researcher Jakob Nielsen says, âMobile use implies less patience for filler copy.â[9]Â Do you tolerate filler words in your writing? Tolerate no longer! Put on your drill-instructor hat, and pull up your text on a smartphone. Stare down every word. Does it contribute to the line-up? If not, out it goes.
Writer Maxwell Hoffmann attests to the value of reviewing his work on a smartphone. When he did this with a white paper that he had written several years before, he found parts of his text nearly unreadable. He reports, âMy thumb nearly fell off scrolling through just three bulleted itemsâŠ. I didnât have the patience for my own thoughts presented in the confines of a handheld smartphone.â[10]
Instructive confession!
How do you recalibrate your definition of concise? Here’s a suggestion. Make yourself a small-screen template in any word processor. Or simply do some of your writing directly on a smartphone. Thatâll get you thinking small.
A small-screen template.
This exercise might sound like unnecessary bother, but it helps you tighten your writingâfor screens of any size. When I asked Hoffmann what percentage of his edits for the small screen also improve the reading experience on the big screen, he said, âOne hundred percent.â[11] Readers never needed all those words.  In this sense, author Luke Wroblewskiâs web-design mantraâ”mobile first”âmakes sense for writing too.[11a]
Ultimately, though, as Ann Rockley (often called the âmother of content managementâ) says, âItâs content first, NOT mobile first, eBook first, or any other first.â[11b] We write not for any one technology but for any technology. The universal mandate to âwrite tightâ transcends technologyâand change itself.
Tips for Adding
Letâs say that you now regularly cut every bit of text you can. Donât stop there. Remember the complementary necessity: adding. Small screen, schmall screen. Go after thin copy. As author William Zinsser advised back when typewriters ruled, âstrip your writing downâ and then âbuild it back up.â[12]
Ask yourself, what else would readers appreciate? Your readersâ fingers are flicking for a reason. Theyâre not chasing after copy thatâs skimpy. They want copy that answers their questions, copy thatâs coherent, logical, useful, convincing, relevant, inspiring, edifying, amusing, fresh, clarifying, and sufficiently detailed.
What kind of details might you add? Choose from paragraph-development standbys like these:
- examples
- anecdotes
- definitions
- quotations
- metaphors
- instructions
- descriptions (sights, sounds, tastes, smells, sensations)
- answers to the W-H questions (who, what, when, where, why, whether, how, how much, how often, what else you got)
Some businesses find their fortunes by providing the right details. Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixitâa popular Web site that provides free repair manuals and advice forumsâsums up the payoff this way: âUsers will love people who teach them what they want to know.â[13]Â The iFixit Web site serves up detail-rich procedures that display beautifully on a screen of any size. The iFixit folks and their engaged customers add, add, add relevant information to this large Web site every day. As a result, they draw large, loyal audiences who order large quantities of parts and tools from them. As one indicator of this Web siteâs success, iFixit has grown to become the second largest supplier of Apple parts after Apple itself.
Ours is an âera of brevityâ? The success of Web sites like iFixit gives the lie to such claims.
An excerpt from a detail-rich repair procedure as viewed in the iFixit app on a smartphone.
Cut and add go together like diet and exercise. Do both, as disciplined writers always have, and watch your flabby sentences and sagging paragraphs transform into specimens, hunks, Perfect 10s. Take the iFixit example. Deliver writing like that, and your true readersâthe ones who are out there right now looking for exactly what you have to offerâwonât be able to pull their eyes away, no matter what size the screen.
Tips for Organizing
We writers for the wee screen also need to organize our material more carefully than ever, especially when it comes to what Nielsen calls âcomplicated content,â like ânightmarishly longâ documents. Nielsen says that complicated content is âroughly twice as hard to understandâ on a smartphone (âa peepholeâ) as on a desktop monitor. Nielsen notes that âa smaller screen hurts comprehensionâ because people can see less at a time, and because they have to move around the page more. He recommends âadding structure and navigationâ to âcreate a tight information space.â[14]
In other words, donât ramble. Organize your material. Ask what good writers have always asked:
- How many sections does this content logically divide into? (Whatever divisions smartphone users would appreciate, you can bet everyone else would too.)
- What section headings will readers find most helpful?
- Where should each section go?
New technologies donât require new organizational skills; they increase the importance of using the old ones.
Tips for Experimenting
All kinds of issues come up as you look at your text on a tiny screen. Youâll have plenty of opportunity to experiment. If your documents, for example, require annotated illustrations (text callouts) or complex tables, consider converting them to a fixed-layout format, which can work surprisingly well on a small screen. Fixed-layout formats are evolving so fast that I hesitate to say much about them except that they fill a need. They enable the electronic publication of cookbooks, comic books, childrenâs books, technical manuals, or other books in which images and text (or text and text) must not reflow but stay connected to make sense.
Bruce Ashton, a fellow attendee of the 2012 Intelligent Content Conference, showed me a fixed-layout technical manual on his iPhone. He explained his companyâs luck: the toolbox-size handbooks they had been printing for 30 years had just the right proportions for todayâs smartphones. Converting the handbooks to a fixed-layout format âis not a quick process but it works,â Ashton writes.[15] This format enables his company, IPT Publishing & Training Ltd., to deliver complex tables and annotated illustrations legibly on an iPhone.
A zoomed-out two-page spread from a fixed-layout e-book. This example comes from a free excerpt of âIPTâs Pipe Trades Handbookâ by Robert A. Lee, downloaded from the iBookstore. Used with permission.
A zoomed-in look at the table text, as legible as you please.
As you encounter challenges of all kinds in writing for screens of all sizes, do what innovative writers have done since the first chisel was laid against the first stone tablet: let the spirit of experimentation lead you. Then share what you learn. We’ll create tomorrowâs options together.
Summary: the More Things ChangeâŠ
When you write for smartphone screensâas we all do, whether we know it or notâyou canât go wrong if you rededicate yourself to the basics: cut, add, organize, and experiment. Don’t fall for the hollow advice to âkeep it short.â Don’t think of mobile users as always in a hurry, and desktop users as tolerant of âhappy talk.â[15]Â Donât create separate mobile âliteâ versions of your content. As interaction designer Josh Clark says, âStripping out content from a mobile website is like … stripping out chapters from a paperback just because it’s smaller. We use our phones for everything now; there’s no such thing as âthis is mobile content, and this is not.ââ[17]
You don’t need a double standard to write for small screens. Good writing is good writing. Think small, yes. But donât stop short just because the screen does.
r y cld jst dlt ll th vwls.[18]
—
This post expands on my post of a year ago: March 16, 2011.Â
[1] Conference presenter Maxwell Hoffmann tells technical writers, âThe most common âsheet of paperâ for a first view of our âdocumentationâ will soon be that tiny screen held in your hand.â See â#ICC12: Resizing Content for the Small Screen: Considerations,” Adobe Tech Comm Suite Evangelist blog, February 24, 2012.
[2]Â Marcia Riefer Johnston, âMarketing Pros: Time to Think Small,â Elliott Design blog, April 29, 2011.
[3]Â Robert Desprez, âRuthlessly Edit When Writing for Mobile,â Robert Desprez Communications blog, November 27, 2011.
[4]Â Tom Johnson, âLess Text, Please: Contemporary Reading Behaviors and Short Formats,â Iâd Rather Be Writing blog, January 21, 2011.
[5] Tom Johnson, âLess Text, Please.â
[6]Â JoAnn T. Hackos, âWhat Makes Minimalism So Popular Today?â CIDM Center for Information-Development Management News, January 2008.
[7]Â JoAnn T. Hackos, âAn Application of the Principles of Minimalism to the Design of Human-Computer Interfaces,â Common Ground (1999), 9:17â22. Reprinted by the Center for Information-Development Management (accessed March 1, 2012).
[8] Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 1932; First Scribner ebook edition 2002), 153â154.
[9]Â Jakob Nielsen, âMobile Content: If in Doubt, Leave It Out,â Usable Information Technology Alertbox column, October 10, 2011.
[10]Â Maxwell Hoffmann, â#ICC12: Resizing Content for the Small Screen: Considerations.â
[11] Maxwell Hoffmann, Resizing Content for the Small Screen: Considerations for Single-Source Authoring for Tablet and Mobile Delivery, live presentation, February 24, 2012, #ICC12 Intelligent Content Conference in Palm Springs, California.
[11a]Â By âmobile firstââthe title of his bookâWroblewski means, âWebsites and applications should be designed and built for mobile first.â Luke Wroblewski, Mobile First (New York: A Book Apart, 2011), 1.
[11b] Rockley says this repeatedly. See Designing Adaptive Content for a Mobile World, an interview with Scott Abel and Val Swisher, May 11, 2012, recorded here: [URL pending]. See also Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: New Riders, 2012), 136â139.
[12] William Zinsser, On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 20.
[13]Â Kyle Wiens, From Web to iPhone to Android to iPad: The iFixit.com Story, live presentation, February 24, 2012, #ICC12 Intelligent Content Conference in Palm Springs, California.
[14]Â Jakob Nielsen, âMobile Content Is Twice as Difficult,â Usable Information Technology (useit.com) Alertbox column, February 28, 2011.
[15]Â Bruce Ashton, e-mail message to the author, March 1, 2012.
[16]Â Stephanie Rieger, âMobile Users Donât Do That,â Beyond the Mobile Web, February 10, 2012.
[17] Josh Clark, âNielsen is wrong on mobile,â .net magazine blog, April 12, 2012.
[18]Â Or you could just delete all the vowels.
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I love this blog. Sometimes an idea takes hold, such as “I have to cut this explanation in half” until a well-reasoned argument comes along and we realize all we have to do is say what needs to be said. No more, no less. That’s always been what’s needed, but of course, that has always been the challenge.
Hi Marcia,
I appreciate your well written article. First, I was also under the impresson that we’ve to make it very short for the small screens. You’ve shaken me out of that idea. When I saw your examples, I recognized my mistake. Yes, we need to make it short as possble but have to keep it long as necessary too. Whatever we do with information, its clarity and completion have to be maintained.No questions on that.
A nice effort in the right direction!
I’m pleased to know that you found this post helpful. Thanks for your note.
I. Love. It. Enough said.
Awfully. Short. And. Sweet. Scott.
I wish I read this when I wrote my review of the gov.uk website. That site was certainly a strange animal–generous white space, vertical lists up the wazoo, responsive web design, state-of-the-art information architecture. But I can’t help but wonder if they’ve oversimplified their copy. (I can’t judge, since I don’t live in the UK.)
Oh, and those run-on sentences….