This is an important question for writers, journalists and bloggers. When readers read your work, your page — just how much do they read? How much of this are you reading right now? Okay, I’m at the beginning sentences so you might not have started skimming yet. Or you might have. It’s like a secret spy cipher. If I could figure out that readers skip most of the text and pick up on about every tenth word, they I could just hide my real message in about ten words apart.
Fortunately there are people out there who do studies on this sort of thing. What may surprise many writers coming to the web from more traditional media is that readers react to onscreen content differently than they do print content. We seem to be more impatient on the web. I don’t know if it’s our reaction to the monitors or the way the text is positioned differently from print media or if it’s just a reaction we have to our expectations from reading online.
Now, did you skip about half of that second paragraph? Bet you did. We read online content, we tend to actually read or see only about 20 percent of the content. So, how to you conquer that? Well, watch this:
- Do you write for the web?
- Do you know readers only read 20% of any page?
- Use bullet points to focus readers on key content.
- Avoid long paragraphs, which tend to be skipped.
There, did that help?