Friday, 12 January 2007

Tony Lawrence's blog style guide


  • Spelling should be in English, not American.

  • Headlines should not shorter than 25 characters and should never break into a second line.

  • No paragraph should be longer than 30 words.

  • No page should be longer than 275 words.

  • There should never be more than five bullet points.

  • ...making this bullet point a house-style heresy.

Thursday, 11 January 2007

Fog index

I have a Fog Index of 13.6. If Chris had allowed me to claim each bullet point as a separate sentence, it would be 9.2. I feel cheated.

The afternoon session

I continued to enjoy the course after lunch until we began to talk about the Fog Index. I consider myself a decent writer but I will now have to revise that opinion. According to Robert Gunning, my English is as impenetrable as a pea-souper.

NUJ Writing for the Web course

Writing for the web is a different art from writing for newspapers, as I discovered while attending a National Union of Journalists' (NUJ) course in London on December 11, 2007.
I already knew the importance of being concise and of breaking up text into manageable bites but soon learnt to:

  • use hyperlinks

  • write for search engines

  • use bullet points and lists


It is a much more complex subject than I had realised. I'm already tempted to sign up for a web design course!