The number that should change how you write

Nielsen Norman Group has been studying how people read on screens for over twenty years. Their finding is consistent and brutal.

People read at most 28 percent of the words on a page. Around 20 percent is more realistic.

Not 28 percent of your best pages. It is 28 percent as a ceiling. Four fifths of what you write will not be read by the average visitor.

And it gets sharper. Roughly eight out of ten people read only the headline and never continue. So a large share of your audience is making their decision from one sentence, and it is the sentence most people write last, in thirty seconds, as an afterthought.

The shape of scanning

People do not read screens in straight lines. Eye tracking across thousands of pages found a repeating F shape.

• A full sweep across the first line of content
• A shorter sweep across a line further down
• Then a vertical scan down the left edge, picking up only the first few words of each line

The first words do most of the work

The practical consequence is that the first two or three words of every line, heading and bullet are doing most of the work. The third word in a sentence already gets far fewer looks than the first two.

This is why so much writing fails despite being well argued. The argument was in the middle of the paragraph, and the middle of the paragraph was never seen.

Write for the scan, then reward the reader

You are not writing to be read start to finish. You are writing to survive a scan, and then to reward the small number of people who slow down.

That means five habits, and they are mechanical rather than creative.

• Front load every sentence. Put the meaning in the first three words. "Refunds take two days" beats "It typically takes around two days for refunds to be processed."
• One idea per paragraph. Two or three sentences maximum. White space is not wasted space. It is what makes the page look answerable.
• Use subheads that carry meaning. Someone should be able to read only your subheads and still understand your point. "How it works" tells them nothing. "It takes about ten minutes" tells them something.
• Use bullets for lists, not for everything. A page of all bullets scans as badly as a page of no bullets, because nothing stands out when everything does.
• Bold sparingly. Bold two or three phrases per screen, and make them the phrases a skimmer needs. Bold everywhere is the same as bold nowhere.

The ten second test

Most visitors decide whether to stay within ten to twenty seconds. A clear, specific value proposition keeps them past that threshold. Clever wordplay that has to be decoded does not.

Show your page to someone for ten seconds, take it away, and ask them what it is and who it is for. If they cannot answer, no amount of good writing further down the page will save it, because they will never reach it.

The one thing to remember

You are not writing something to be read. You are writing something to be scanned, and rewarding the few who stop.