5. Words To Watch Out For

Early websites were almost entirely written by geeks, who tend to speak a peculiar version of English which is riddled with acronyms and buzzwords. As a result, web copy as we know it was born with a range of common phrases, such as ‘check out’, that have quickly become hackneyed and over-used.

Early web speak also had a tendency to relate to the underlying architecture of sites rather than their content, which may have been interesting to other web designers but certainly not to a general audience. Hence the common use on the internet of phrases such as ‘check out this web page’. (What would you make of the line ‘check out this page’ in a printed publication?)

So watch out for (and avoid) phrases like:

• check out
• click (as in ‘click here’)
• come back often
• cool
• current
• cutting edge
• feel free
• surf
• view.