Off the top of my head, I can’t cite one example. Given how much time I spend on a computer “surfing the net,” this is sort of unbelievable but extremely common. After some research on the subject, here are some of my conclusions and a review of the basic tips.

Web copy is often full of glaring mistakes, written in a sterile corporate vernacular, or just plain sloppy. Why is this such a widespread problem? Many reasons, but mostly, businesses don’t spend the extra time or money to really focus on the text. Who can blame them? Usually, the people hired to spend time on the text aren’t always thinking very creatively and haven’t set a working standard. As a result, web design and development take priority, and afterward, words and phrases are sprinkled over the top like black pepper over an ice cream sundae.

Context is everything, that’s why it’s difficult to talk about web copy so broadly. Companies emphasis different voices based on their services. Some stress professionalism, others want to come across as casual and fun, and many others want the middle ground. Nevertheless, here are some basic guidelines that all of them should practice:

1. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t read yourself.
It’s easy to think of the average consumer as a faceless creature, trolling the Internet looking for corporate buzzwords like “synergy” and “core competencies,” etc. The fact is, consumers are people too.

2. Be real
Even the most professional corporation is trying to attract “real people” – most of whom watch prime-time television, eat at McDonald’s when no one’s looking, and do most of their communicating in conversation, casual texting or in blurby e-mails. Confusing buzzwords and lofty speeches are for politicians and crooked car salesmen. Write your copy for decent humans.

3. Be brief. It makes you look confident.
Instead of being long-winded or wordy to impress your target market, do the opposite. Speak confidently and briefly. Bullets and spacing go a long way in this regard. Remember, most people are like you and won’t read all the text. At best, you’ll get a “glance” or even a “browse.” Use this time wisely and build your text like a children’s pop up book.

5. Be distracting
You should always treat your audience like adults. At the same time, most of us would be lying if we said we weren’t addicted to distraction much like the average toddler. Entice and intrigue. Sometimes it’s appropriate to flirt with controversy or the element of surprise. For example, a recent JLB ad reads: “Who do you think you are?” Click it and find our ad for branding. See what I mean? The real test here is whether our actual article is as clever as our banner. Gut check. Other methods involve asking a question or preparing  for what you’re about to tell them. Keep your reader tracking with you as though you were face to face. Bottom line: Creativity is key even in the stuffiest of professions.

6. Tell a story
The most basic business has a story. Take the time to write your story. Literally. Find the guiding principals, dramatic turns and the journey that brought your company where it is now. Use your findings tactfully in your copy and make sure the end result of your web content takes your reader from point A to point B. A being your initial vision and B being their solution.

Taking your Web copy seriously doesn’t mean making it serious.

Some websites will need to lean on a few of the points I mentioned over others. There isn’t a formula, so be creative and concise. Most of your web visitors are there to do research or homework. Surprise them with more. Surprise yourself with the results.

Understand, Final Draft is THE software for screen writing and hasn’t caught up with cloud technology? Even while most of its clients – at some point in the writing process – will be writing with a partner from a distance! Sorry, this is just so unbelievable to me. So I called Final Draft and explained this glaring problem. Here’s the answer I got: Final Draft is already getting started on a program using cloud technology (oh cool) that should launch in 2013! (What?!) In TWO YEARS!? We could all be transferring data via telepathy by then!

Anyway, this article in the NYTimes reminded me just how far behind many large technology corporations are on cloud technology. An innovation that has become so obvious and so helpful.

If you’re new to social networking, you might not know what HootSuite does. If you’ve been social networking, you might not realize how far HootSuite extends.

So what is this technological joviality? HootSuite is web-based software for social media management. It is a resource that brings many of your social networking profiles under one roof. HootSuite built its business as a “Twitter tool,” allowing for the management of multiple Twitter accounts. But it has expanded its reach to include Facebook profiles, Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, Myspace, and Foursquare.

For a brand management firm like JLB, HootSuite is a powerful tool that allows us to manage our own social media profiles in one place. And with the Pro version, we can manage our clients’ accounts in one spot, as well. This means if you’ve got a message that you want to distribute to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn simultaneously, you can post it into HootSuite and assign it to all three networks with just a click. (Gone are the days of logging into three social networking accounts and “copying/pasting” the message multiple times.)

And, if you are the kind of business that likes to tailor its announcements and plan out  Tweets, Status Updates, and Posts, HootSuite allows for the scheduling of messages. This is very helpful when planning an overall social media campaign for the month (let alone for the year). It’s a great way to craft a series of messages and develop your comapny’s voice.

What’s more, HootSuite provides rich statistical data for Twitter and Facebook accounts — allowing us to see the effectiveness of a series of Tweets or reading into the demographics of your Facebook fans, for example. HootSuite even has a tie-in for your Google Analytics (one of the more powerful stats trackers on the Web).

Sounds pretty nifty, huh? We think so, and we’re expecting to see HootSuite expand its social networking reach over the coming year.

With a bit of hindsight, I’ve realized that the brevity of my writing was likely a key to my academic success.  Those professors probably assigned 3,000 words on “King Lear” because their experience told them that most students would need that much space to get around to saying anything. I said something, but left out the filler — even though I’d wager that I spent more time writing five pages than many of my classmates spent writing eight.

While my pared-down writing style wasn’t intentional( it was just the only way I knew how to write), I’m finding now that my natural tendency towards less over more serves me well as a copywriter. If my professors, staring down a stack of ungraded essays, appreciated seeing the a compact arrangement of the essential ideas, the average website visitor probably appreciates it more.  Most of the time, folks on the Web want to find the desired information quickly and with minimum effort.

Of course, in copywriting, merely including the relevant information isn’t enough. Style and syntax are critical if the text is to have any life on the page (or screen). In truth, the smaller the body of text, the more carefully these various elements have to be balanced. Add to that a need to keep SEO in mind (keywords, headings, etc.) when writing specifically for the Web.

Condensing all of the previously mentioned elements in to a seamless bit of text is one of the most satisfying and challenging tasks I perform at JLB. The work can be mentally exhausting, but a result both that appears effortless and tells the client’s story is well worth the struggle.

Since that time, NeoOffice, which is available for free (although donations are encouraged), has been my primary word processor.  While it may be a bit less polished than Word, NeoOffice generally gets the job done and feels similar enough to Word to be quickly usable without making too many major adjustments or learning too many new tricks.  Still, NeoOffice also retains some of the hassles of Word.  It’s big and slow and ponderous, and it tends to auto-correct and auto-format to the point of pushiness.  I spent half an hour last week trying to figure out how to prevent the program from auto-formatting an outline that I was making for a web page.  I never did find a solution to the problem, because I eventually gave up and just copied all of my work over to TextEdit.  Thirty minutes that I have to research a function of my word processor is thirty minutes that I’m not writing.

TextEdit is an application I’ve found myself double-clicking more and more often since starting at JLB Works around a month ago. This is partly for its function as a HTML text editor, but I’ve also used it for basic composition.  The application is visually dull and light on features, but it opens quickly and doesn’t try to predict all of my formatting preferences.  It’s been my go-to option for jotting down a quick note or a login name or producing a group of meta tags for HTML.  In its defense, I don’t think that it is intended to be a serious writing tool, and if it is, I find it personally too limited and uninspiring for lengthier compositions.

Enter Bean. Bean is a simple word processor based on the structure of TextEdit, but with a few additional writer-friendly features: perhaps most notably, live word count, adjustable page margins, and control over headers and footers.  Programmed by a writer of fiction, Bean was designed to stay out of the way of the creative process and let writers get their thoughts down with minimal fuss.  For me, Bean does exactly that.

Bean’s default format is the versatile .rtfd format, but it also allows the user to save into nine other formats, including Word’s .doc file format.  There are serious limitations to Bean’s compatibility with Word’s formatting, but the point is, a Word user can read a file from Bean and vice versa.

I can’t claim with certainty that my search for a word processor is over.  I may take a closer look at Apple’s relatively affordable iWork Pages in the future, revert back to the industry standard of Word when I have a bit more money in my pocket, or get adventurous and play around with one of the many other options for word processing on a Mac. But for the moment, Bean is hitting the sweet spot between functionality, simplicity, and good looks.  With this app, I can focus on writing and ignore the writing tool.