Writing to suit your readers

By Lisa Robinson, Director
Published in Desktop Magazine, May 2001

One of the first things that radio journalists learn is that writing for radio is different than writing for a newspaper, magazine or other print documents. When people listen to the radio they’re usually doing something else at the same time, like driving the car or making breakfast, so they’re not as focused on the daily news as someone reading the newspaper over a cup of coffee.

Radio writers developed writing techniques that complement the way people listen to the radio. A typical radio news item is much shorter than the same story written for print, and information is presented in brief chunks to ensure that people remain interested and don’t go turning the dial to another station.

Web writers should take a leaf from the radio copywriter’s book and learn to adjust their writing style to suit the way that people use their medium. Too many web content writers write how they have always written – in a style intended for a print-based media. Consequently the web is filled with sites that read like print brochures, academic papers or fashion magazines.

Last year the Poynter Institute, an American journalism school, conducted an eye-tracking study to examine how people address internet news sites (see http://www.poynter.org/eyetrack2000/index.htm). While newspaper readers tend to address images before text, the study found that web users tended to address text before images.

This finding might seem a tad obvious considering that text downloads before images. At a shallow level it might lead us to believe that we should ensure images download quickly, or that we should place interesting copy at the beginning so that the user’s interest is held until the images arrive. However the full implications of this finding stretches much further. It suggests that the way people read on the web is substantially different from the way people read a print document. This finding should make web writers consider how people read their site, and how they can adjust their writing to complement this reading style.

When you’re reading from a monitor, you’re sitting at a desk with your hand on your mouse, staring at a glary noisy low-resolution screen. You’re not sitting somewhere comfortable holding a silent, unimposing high-resolution piece of paper. When you’re looking for information on a web site other sites are only a mouse-click away. When you’re looking for information in the paper-based world finding a better document involves substantially more effort; you’ve got to identify it, locate it and obtain it before you can even think about reading it.

Web users have the patience of a puppy exploring a new home. They tear around the entire house trying to take everything in and are reluctant to spend a lot of time sniffing a single item in case there’s something better around the corner. This impatient mindset is one of the reasons that web users read in a different manner than print readers. Web users scan whole pages in seconds, their eyes racing from page to page and link to link in an effort to hit that jackpot of information.

One of the simplest ways web writers can adjust their writing style to suit web users is to make their text easier to scan. Scannable text should include plenty of “signposts”. A user should be able to look at a page and extract information from it without having to read it word for word. On a long page scannable text ensures that users can see where different information is being addressed. It enables them to easily identify and locate the information that is most relevant to them.

Very few sites have no competition; chances are that many other sites offer the same kind of information or service as yours. Users are more likely to remain at a site and return to it if they can effortlessly find relevant content written in an easy-to-read format. Considering how people will read from your site is one of the first steps to creating more useable content.

Tips for writing scannable text

Bold text is a useful way to draw the user’s eye to relevant keywords Subheadings can be used to separate different sections of text Bulleted or numbered list are easier to scan than lists within a sentence Hyperlinks create areas of emphasis within text, so choose the words that you link on carefully Remember that emphasising too much can result in nothing being emphasised at all