Goo Gobs…It’s Candy
Tight, carefully worded content beats goo gobs of crappy overwritten posts. Get to the point for readers’ sake when website posting.
Keep prose to a minimum. Spare everyone from daily ramblings. Believe it or not, other people don’t cherish every word or flowery phrase you share.
Most people stop reading after the headline.
The average U.S. readers’ attention span is about two seconds long. This is just enough time to scan for words or phrases that appeal to them. Online scanning lessens content reading because of the ability or compulsion to click through and move on.
Most people haven’t ventured this far into the story because they’re bored or can’t read well.
United States literacy levels prohibit lengthy reads.
The latest National Assessment of Adult Literacy done in 2003 tested 19,000 people. Result averages shown below were combined with then-population to produce the following statistics:
-
- Literate: could not answer simple test questions
- 7 million
- Below Basic:no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills
- 14% or 30 million
- Basic:can perform simple and everyday literacy activities
- 29% or 63 million
- Intermediate:can perform moderately challenging literacy activities
- 44% or 95 million
- Proficient: can perform complex and challenging literacy activities
- 13% or 28 million
- Literate: could not answer simple test questions
So get to the point. Cut the junk. Read and re-read. Keep it short or readers will miss the point. Copy editing is not as easy as it looks. Try it for yourself:
Here’s an unedited paragraph about online shopping:
Online shopping is the process whereby consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller in real-time, without an intermediary service, over the Internet. If an intermediary service is present the process is called electronic commerce. An online shop, eshop, e-store, internet shop, webshop, webstore, online store, or virtual store evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a bricks-and-mortar retailer or in a shopping mall. The process is called Business-to-Consumer (B2C) online shopping. When a business buys from another business it is called Business-to-Business (B2B) online shopping. Both B2C and B2B online shopping are forms of e-commerce.
Source: Wikipedia
Here’s the paragraph edited:
E-commerce is online shopping. Consumers buy products over the Internet instead of in-store.
Short is sweet.
