What is the difference between online and offline these days?

Mary Rose over at Brightspark posed an interesting question to the grammar police yesterday - http://brightspark-consulting.com/blog/2009/03/when-to-use-punctuation-on-bulleted-lists-a-question/

It was to do with question marks, full stops and bulleted lists.

It got me to think about how we write full stop. (Excuse the pun!). Do we write differently for the web than we do for print? I posed the question back to MR and her response was a really interesting one. She said:

“I believe that web writing has risen the bar for offline writing. If we don’t put up with waffle and marketing fluffle online, why should we put up with it on a piece of printed paper too?”

An interesting perspective, especially as earlier on today, I sat down with a cuppa and read the Sunday Business Post main section - in 10 mins!

I got the gist of most of the articles, I have an idea of what ones i want to go back and read and now, I’m ready to move onto the Agenda section of the paper.

What happened to leisurely Sundays reading the papers?

I’m now applying my ‘read-at-a-glance’ technique to offline media now. Is it just me?

Someone said to me recently that “This Recession will slow us all down”. Maybe that person has a point.

And if she does, then the way we promote our businesses and brands will change. If we have more time, then we’ll chat more on the phone rather than SMS or Twitter. And that’s one simple way our life could change.

But will we ever go back to being slower? People want information now and have come to expect it….so it’s part of our psyche now.  And if that’s the case, then bite sized pieces of information to attract customers will stay important.

So getting back to my original point - if we write differently for the web than print, then we and our audience read differently. So right now, there is very little difference between offline and online in terms of reading and writing.

The essentials of life…and business!