Dating since 1041, printing presses definitely did their job for almost one thousand years. Print Writing has been the most common and the most useful way to express opinions and ideas. It was one of the instruments that lead to evolution, because it was able to transmit information to a great amount of people.
It was only in the 20th century when the amazing World Wide Web has been born, when the computer changed everything that the society was used to until then, which was writing on paper and its alternatives. Those two techniques are very different and both of them are limited in some ways. The good thing about it is that someone can use both writing for sites and writing for print at the same time in order to reach a bigger number of readers.
But before thinking about such strategies, it is crucial to know the main differences.
Keeping in mind that audience is one of the most important factors, both writing for print and for sites have pros and cons. While for print writing you usually need to buy the product in order to see the information, for some sites writing you can access it for free. But this could also lead to a bad consequence, which is the quality of the text. There is less guarantee that the information you just read is authentic when it comes to site writing. Also, the translation of different texts could be altered and it can be confusing for international users.
On the other hand, the writer doesn’t have to wait to be published when it comes to writing for sites. Your essays, stories, articles and so on will be out there waiting for its readers with one click away. It is also easier for readers to search for information; they can skim a text and see if they can find what they need in your text without having to read all of it. This automatically means you can organize your writing and make it a lot easier for both reader and writer to search for things.
If you want to choose between writing for print and writing for a site, ask yourself what are you going to write about? What’s the age of most of your readers? Not everyone can use a computer so if you believe that your audience is going to be mainly made of people who don’t know how to use internet, you might want to consider writing for print.
Which one is better?
That’s something up to you. Don’t be afraid to start something new, it may come as a surprise that web writing is mainstream at the moment. So is writing for print. I believe that both of them are great instruments for sharing information to the world. There is no such thing as “better” when it comes to site writing vs. print writing and it us up to the user which of them is capable of offering more success.
If I were you, I’d write for both!
