Traveling along the developing landscape of
digital history exposes one to a whole new set of methods, digital editing
techniques and the importance of understanding your viewing audience. The factor which helps balance the presentation of your work with all the fancy web layouts and having
genuine well documented digital presentation of your research is the writing
quality and uniqueness of your writing. Writing for the web can be similar to
traditional academic writing but with some unique twist.Writing for the web requires one to have a keen grasp of the expectations and goals of the myriad of viewers of one's site. Writers for web publications need to present their finding in very concise sentences with catchy phrases and the ability to quickly convey the main points you want readers to know. According to Yahoo Style Guide, "Instant gratification, the ability to find what they want on a webpage fast" is fundamentally imperative for writing for the web. Compared to academic writing for classroom or research purposes which stresses elaboration and elongate analysis of information, writing for web seems to be more simple in many respects. Creating writing for the web requires one to have an understanding of the nonlinear hypertext ability of readers to follow your writing in very nontraditional ways. In the printed world, writers tend to write for readers who will follow the logic of their work in a sequential manner starting with the introduction and gradually reading up to the conclusion. But in the realm of cyberspace, readers have the ability to jump with a click of the mouse to the middle or ending of one's writing at a drop of a dime. Writers need to understand this factor and make the adjustment in their writing style, if they want to be successful in online publishing of quality work that hold their audience attention and keep users coming back to their site.
Writing for the web seems to have many more outlets for armature writers and future historians. Some of these outlets such as blogs tend to allow the writer much more intellectual freedom in expressing ideas and receiving a plethora of feedback from a wider range of individuals ( laymen, students and scholars). In contrast to the printed world, where the big publication houses, journal review boards and other academic outlets have the tendency to be confined to a very select few of gifted writers with very rigid rules for accepting your work.
Developing your writing skills for digital publication necessitates breaking away from the traditional cognitive ways of perceiving the writing process. Freedom and exposure to a wider audience, one can reap if they explore the very fruitful benefits and rewarding opportunities available to you when you chose writing for digital publications and other online mediums.
