When runner Roger Bannister (now Sir Roger Bannister) propelled his body across an Oxford track finish line on a blustery day in May 1954, he was reasonably confident he had achieved a four-minute mile.

The rest of the universe, however, was stunned. The world record (until then,4:01.4) had stood for nine years and sportswriters of the day had created an enormous mystique around the four-minute mark.

*The artwork of M.C. Escher shows crazy worlds in which staircases appear to go nowhere and people "sit" upside down or sideways.

*The plywood pillar at your local museum is painted a creamy, mottled white, with deep grey veins and other imperfections so it looks like real marble.

*When you put your dinner on a 12-inch plate instead of a 17-inch one, you eat less food and feel more satisfied by it.

When asked if he ever talked to himself, Woody Allen liked to respond: "Yeah, it's the only way I know to have an intelligent conversation with someone." Ba-da-bum.

Seriously, though, talking to yourself is big problem for many of us writers. That's because we spend a lot of each day in our own heads, lost in our own thoughts. And our interior selves are prone to nattering.

Writing for the web sometimes seems like a mysterious, almost mystical process. It's also the subject of much conflicting advice.

"Write short," say some experts. People who read the Internet only scan. "Nah," retort others. "Be absolutely sure you answer all of the customers' questions. Write as long as you need to make the sale."

Instead of getting stuck in the long-versus-short debate, I like to cut through the bafflegab by focusing on a web writing trick that's wonderfully simple, straightforward and non-controversial.

Imagine picking up your daily newspaper and fiding blank pages. Or turning on the 6 p.m. news to be greeted by a perfectly coiffed host intoning, "Nothing actually happened in the word today, so in place of our usual newscast, we're bringing you this rerun of The Simpsons." You can't picture that actually happening, can you?

And not because there's no such thing as a "slow news" day.