How to Get People to Read Your Content Rather Than Scan It

Most web page surfers don’t read the majority of the content in front of them. They scan.

And no, it’s not because the Internet obliterated everybody’s attention span. (At least that isn’t the only reason.) A hundred years ago, virtually nobody read an entire newspaper front to back. They scanned the headlines and skipped most of the articles. Most who took a deeper dive didn’t finish most what they started to read.

That’s okay. No one can read everything. More books are published every day than most people read in a year. More content is uploaded to the Internet every five minutes than most people can read in a year.

We all have to pick and choose—especially if we’re browsing the Internet during a guilty five-minute break at work.

Content producers need to remember that every time they write something for the web, whether it’s a news article, a sales pitch or a product description.

Here are some tips that will serve you well every time:

Use plenty of white space. Hardly anyone who isn’t forced to read an assignment for English class will trudge through something with paragraphs large enough to kill a human being. Try to limit the number of sentences in each paragraph to four if you can and five, max.

Use bullet lists. Break down some of your content into bullet lists if it’s appropriate. Just keep a few things in mind.

• Bullet lists don’t always work.
• List items should stand on their own. Don’t reduce them to single words.
• If one of your bullet list items is a complete sentence, all of them should be.
• Alternatively, if one of your bullet list items is a sentence fragment, all of them should be.

Create bold-face sub-headings like this one. People who scan a web page will almost certainly read the bold-face sub-headings if they don’t read anything else. If you can boil the gist down to four or five simple points, consider highlighting them. Those who scan your content will get it while those who read the whole thing will be rewarded with depth.

Search and destroy all unnecessary words. Nothing bogs down a piece of writing more than bloated sentences. If you spend five words every time two will do, your content will look like hard work before readers even get started. And as soon as they do get started, you’ll transform all but the most committed into scanners—and that’s if you’re lucky. Most will move their mouse up toward the Back button.