Web Writing — Part Three, American style and CMF

Welcome to part three of the guide to presenting web work professionally. In Part One we started work as a content provider, and in Part Two we looked at writing detail. Now we should realise that many of the world’s English language websites are located in North America. This means that if you live elsewhere, you have a huge market to serve, but you need to adapt to their readers and editors.

Language difference

American websites, like Fresh Fiction, a media site based in Texas which sends me e-books to review, will want to alter your copy, if you write in Irish or British English. Recognise what they might change and make it easy. Use mom instead of mum or mam. Airplane instead of aeroplane. I find it extremely hard to type color or theater, but they can check those easily in their spillchucker. They can’t alter other terms as easily. Either leave out idioms, which vary by country, or get them right. For example, Americans would often mention a barn door rather than a stable door, and they might refer to pork barrel politics, but if you are not entirely sure what that means, don’t use the term. If your readership is located in a major city, why are you talking about barn doors and barrels anyway? Find a way to get your point across that makes sense to the reader.

Americans are used to sentences without enough prepositions. “I went to a meeting Thursday.” I would say that I went to a meeting on Thursday. Some of their lines don’t make grammatical sense, like, “She had on a nightdress.” Still, send your copy in with correct grammar and let the editor change anything they wish to suit their readers.

I found that at Fresh Fiction there was one or more dedicated review editors, and these ladies have always been professional and helpful. They appreciate you behaving in the same way. Don’t promise you will send in content and then forget, or have it posted a day late. They need content by a deadline. If you can’t make the deadline, notify the editor as soon as you know. Remember, they are working in a different time zone. Editors also don’t like you to send long emails. Keep mail short, polite and to the point. You may be asked to join a board like Slack, or Microsoft Teams. This cuts down on the jammed inboxes.

Site style

Ask what the site style requires. In American terms you might say someone is African American, Latino or Latina American, Chinese American. As discussed before, leave out hyphens. Or the site might eschew ethnic divisions and let the photos do the talking. Does the site use older words like eschew? Replace with avoid, if it doesn’t.

Run an eye over what the site posts, as soon as possible. This is mostly done by copy-pasting, and something can slip past the editor’s eagle eye. I caught a headline which had changed from “Fast Paced” to “Fat Paced”. I notified the editor. “Great catch!”

Content Management Forms

If you are filling out a CMF which is a content management form, sometimes those get sent to an editor but increasingly in news sites they go straight onto a page facing the public. You will not be able to edit them once submitted. There will be a few reference boxes for you to fill out, like content tags or names of people mentioned, dates, maybe a headline. I find copy-pasting much the easiest way to do this work, especially if long numbers are involved.

Sometimes the site really does not want you using any odd characters in the CMF like a semicolon, query, ampersand, or exclamation mark. The reason is that the site behind is running on SQL or System Query Language. You have injected some SQL into their string. This may get your whole page rejected or have other odd results visible. Usually it’s okay to put them on the public-facing article but only use ampersand if it’s in a company name, Jane Smith & Co., and keep the others to a bare minimum.

This doesn’t mean American sites only want modern American content: books from other countries and time periods are extremely popular, and the same will be found if you write about classic cars, adventure holidays, or fashions.

Next time: Setting up a page or site.

Screenshots by Clare O’Beara, original content from Fresh Fiction.

Originally published at http://insidedbs.wordpress.com on January 20, 2021.