Tips

On Brevity

Scan On!

One idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph).

—Nielsen (1997b)

Business readers are skimmers; many go weeks at a time without reading a paragraph all the way through.

—Weiss (1991)

Original Paragraph:

ActiveX controls are just one part of the whole ActiveX technology, and we should really focus our attention there. ActiveX itself is a revision of Microsoft’s early OLE standards, which competitors found too desktop-centered. The modifications to ActiveX technology help make network objects more secure, more usable on multiple platforms, and smaller, so they move faster across the network. Of course, some competitors argue that ActiveX and DCOM do not interoperate with multivendor open object standards such as COBRA, and Microsoft has said it will upgrade to work with CORBA, but has not done the implementation at this time. The basic idea behind ActiveX technology is to support platform-independent, reusable software objects, so that an intranet or the Internet can offer a broad assortment of prebuilt functions.

Revised Paragraph:

The modifications to ActiveX technology help make network objects more secure, more usable on multiple platforms, and smaller, so they move faster across the network. The idea behind ActiveX technology is to support platform-independent, reusable software objects, so that an intranet or the Internet can offer a broad assortment of prebuilt functions.

Of course, some competitors argue that Microsoft has not gone far enough, even in this revision of ActiveX technology, and its related standard, DCOM. The competitors argue that ActiveX and DCOM do not interoperate with multivendor open object standards such as COBRA, and Microsoft has said it will upgrade to work with CORBA, but has not done the implementation at this time.

Challenge: Focus each paragraph on one topic.

The browser can be viewed as an application that runs on the client and manages the connection with the network, making the connection, transferring data, and interpreting and displaying the data received through a GUI. Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) have a long history, going back to early work at Xerox PARC, resulting in products such as the Xerox Star and Apple Macintosh. The browser’s reliance on a GUI is a manifestation of its birthdate, when GUIs were well established, with Windows beginning to dominate throughout the industry. The browser therefore makes pictures, text, animation, video, and sound available to the user, in a hypertext environment. To initiate a connection, the browser requests a connection with Web servers across a Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN), using the standard Internet network protocol, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), or a gateway to TCP/IP.

See: Morkes & Nielsen (1997), Nielsen (1997a, 1997b), Weiss (1991)

• Create a title that means something! (October 1, 1998)

• Insert more headlines and subheads.(October 15, 1998)

• Highlight key words, phrases--and links. (November 1, 1998)

• Turn any list into a bulleted or numbered list. (November 15, 1998)

• Put the idea of the paragraph first. (December 15, 1998)