What writers & others say
“Content may be king on the web, but few people actually read web copy word by word.”
— Karen Brighton, senior manager of digital content, ServiceNow
“On the Web, there is no such thing as leisurely browsing. We want to gather as much information as quickly as our eyes and fingers can move.”
— Nicholas Carr, author, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“People read paper. They use the web.”
— TJ Larkin, Larkin Communications Consulting
“A screen-based reading behavior is emerging. [It’s characterized by] browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading [and] non-linear reading.”
— Ziming Liu, library science professor at San José State University and author of “Reading Behavior in the Digital Environment”
“Because most people aren’t going to painstakingly go through and read your content word-by-word, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to quickly comprehend your content.”
— Colin Newcomer, freelance writer
“It’s the height of arrogance to assume that all of your customers are extraordinarily interested in everything you write — more likely, they’ll read a few pages and scan the rest.”
— Jakob Nielsen, “the king of usability”
“People spend less than a minute on content pages, even when they’re looking at long articles or detailed product specs.”
— Jakob Nielsen, “the king of usability”
“People don’t read online. They scan.”
— Jakob Nielsen, “the king of usability”
“As little as 16% of people actually read content word-by-word.”
— Jakob Nielsen, “the king of usability”
“How long will users stay on a web page before leaving? It’s a perennial question, yet the answer has always been the same: Not very long.”
— Jakob Nielsen, “the king of usability”
“In information-foraging terms, blocks of text are analogous to the hard shell of a tortoise. Many predators will let the sluggish critter go because it’s simply not worth their time and effort to break open the shell to get at the meat. Similarly, web users often think that digging through dense type takes more time than it’s worth.”
— Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger, co-authors of Prioritizing Web Usability
“Digital immersion has even affected the way [kids] absorb information. They don’t necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest.”
— Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World
“New forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
— Peter Williams and Ian Rowlands, University College London researchers and the authors of “Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future”
“Accept that people scan web pages, rather than reading them in detail, and work with this reality rather than fighting it.”
— Pamela Wilson, author
“The dirtiest four-letter word in the English language: ‘read.’”
— Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics website
Lift Ideas Off the Screen
Web visitors read, on average, 20% of the words on the page. But which words — and how can you put your messages there?
Would you like to learn which words they’re reading, and how to put your key messages where their eyes are?
If so, join our Reach Readers Online — our web-writing workshop.
In this web-writing workshop, you’ll make sure even flippers and skimmers can get the gist of your message — without reading the paragraphs.
