Reference
Resources
Books, articles, tools, and sites worth bookmarking. Curated for practitioners and anyone writing interface copy.
- Microcopy: The Complete Guide Kinneret Yifrah's definitive book on UX writing — covers voice, tone, error messages, onboarding, and more. The primary source behind much of this site.
- Nielsen Norman Group — Writing for the Web Research-backed articles on web writing, scanning behavior, readability, and UX copy. The most cited source in the field.
- The A11Y Project A community-maintained accessibility reference. Practical, approachable, and regularly updated. Good companion to the Inclusive writing section of this site.
- Mailchimp Content Style Guide One of the most widely referenced public content style guides. Worth reading for its voice and tone section and its approach to accessibility writing.
- MDN Glossary Mozilla's web technology glossary — a useful model for how to write reference entries that define, contextualise, and interlink terms.
- Writing for Lower-Literacy Users — NN/G Research on how lower-literacy users read the web, with practical guidance on sentence structure, word choice, and formatting that benefits all users.
- Hemingway Editor Paste in your copy and get instant feedback on readability — highlights long sentences, passive voice, and unnecessary adverbs.
- How Users Read on the Web — NN/G The original 1997 article that established how people scan rather than read online. Still essential reading, and still accurate.
- WebAIM Contrast Checker Check colour contrast ratios against WCAG standards. Relevant when making copy decisions that interact with visual design — like label colours and disabled states.