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Provider: University of Victoria
Database: The Map of Early Modern London
Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
TY - ELEC
A1 - Jenstad, Janelle
A1 - McLean-Fiander, Kim
A1 - Tanigawa, Katie
ED - Jenstad, Janelle
T1 - Tips on Writing for the Web
T2 - The Map of Early Modern London
ET - 7.0
PY - 2022
DA - 2022/05/05
CY - Victoria
PB - University of Victoria
LA - English
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/web_writing_tips.htm
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/web_writing_tips.xml
ER -
Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017. Joey Takeda was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA honours in English (with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria in 2016. His primary research interests included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.
Project Manager, 2015-2019. Katie Tanigawa was a doctoral candidate at the University of Victoria. Her dissertation focused on representations of poverty in Irish modernist literature. Her additional research interests included geospatial analyses of modernist texts and digital humanities approaches to teaching and analyzing literature.
Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.
Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–2020. Associate Project Director, 2015. Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014. MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander comes to
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of
Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC). Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the project and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was a co-applicant on MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.
Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.
Keep your writing taut and to the point. Some variation in syntax keeps your prose lively, but subject-verb-object syntax should predominate. Avoid baroque sentences with inverted syntax and subordinate clauses.
Point-first writing is particularly important in the web environment. Make sure each paragraph begins with a point sentence (sometimes called a topic sentence or mini-claim). Readers often skim in the web environment. Make sure the first sentence in each paragraph summarizes the contents of the paragraph.
Web readers are accustomed to viewing shorter sections of text than are typically found in printed texts. Such an arrangement makes it easier for readers to scan the page quickly for the information that is of interest to them.
Divide your article into a number of discrete sections and use a short, descriptive heading for each section. Note that MoEML recommends particular headings for Encyclopedia pages. These headings will generate the Contents List that appears on the left-hand side of a MoEML page. We can encode up to five levels of sub-headings.
Paragraph lengths are typically shorter in the web environment than in print.
The electronic medium means that you have the opportunity to support your writing with any number of hypertext links. There is no need to interrupt the flow of your writing with discursive or parenthetical asides. You may make links to pages/projects outside the MoEML environment, to other pages within MoEML, to a particular section on a MoEML page, to the Agas map (with your custom drawing on the map, if you wish), and to other sections within your own contribution.
Provide a logical piece of text for your readers to click on to get to that other page, project, or section. (Another way of thinking about this issue: the MoEML encoders need to wrap the hyperlink around a string of text.) Click here for [something]
is clunky but clear. If you can, just integrate into your own prose a logical term or phrase that will bear the hyperlink.
Although MoEML will normally encode your article for you, you need to tell us where to create hyperlinks and where they should point. See Preparing your Contribution for Encoding for more details.
Bulleted or numbered lists work well in the web environment. We can encode either type of list very easily, as well as lists within lists.
Tables with 3-4 columns also work well in the MoEML environment. If you want your table to have sortable columns, tell us how you want them to sort (alphabetically or numerically).
We highly recommend the use of images in your contribution. Images illustrate your point(s) and also break up long blocks of text. See our Contributor Guidelines on the use of images.
Avoid using semi-colons (unless they appear in a quotation), because they look like commas on many screens.