Yes, reading that blog post does make your butt look bigger. But mushy thighs are just one of the symptoms of screen reading.

In fact, the side effects of reading on the screen are starting to sound a lot like the insert in my asthma medication.

Every time you write a blog post, web page, news release or social media status update, you are subjecting your readers to:

Back, neck and shoulder pain

Lugging your iPad and iPhone around can be a pain in the neck. And the back and shoulders.

Americans are experiencing more back, neck and shoulder problems because of their handheld devices, the American Chiropractic Association announced recently.

That’s just one more obstacle you have to overcome to get people to read your online copy.

Is your website a pain in the ass?

Insomnia

Reading that email or blog post before bedtime can literally cause your readers to lose sleep.

At least, that’s what researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital say.

The researchers observed folks reading an e-book on an iPad for four hours before bedtime. Then they watched the same participants read printed books before bedtime.

The results?

Reading from a screen before bedtime makes readers:

• Stay awake longer. Screen readers took 10 minutes longer to fall asleep than print readers. That’s because blue light from the screen reduces readers’ levels of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep and sleep cycles.
• Get sick. That reduction in melatonin may also increase readers’ risk of contracting breast and prostate cancer, diabetes, heart disease and obesity, studies show.
• Suffer body clock confusion. Their device’s blue light also messes with readers’ circadian rhythms. In other words, reading your blog post on an iPad at 10 p.m. can give your readers jet lag. (And my goal in life is to never write anything that makes my readers feel as if they’ve just stumbled off of a flight from Boston to Bhutan.)
• Enjoy less REM sleep. Known as the “dreaming” phase, this crucial stage of sleep is what lets our brains process memories, emotions and stress. Afraid your co-workers might go postal? Have you ever considered that your web copy might be the culprit?
• Stumble into work late and exhausted. Not exactly the purpose of our intranet, is it?

The Harvard/ Brigham and Women’s research supports previous studies, which also found that screen time before sleep can be detrimental. Several studies have associated lack of sleep with shortened life span.

Mushy thighs, obesity, heart disease and colon cancer

You might want to sit down for this. Or not.

Prolonged sitting shortens the average person’s life span by two years, according to a study by researchers at the American Cancer Society published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

“Sitting is the most underrated health threat of modern times,” writes Tom Rath, author of The New York Times bestseller Eat, Move, Sleep.

In other words, sitting is the new smoking.

Sitting for most of the day, according to a Washington Post piece, is linked to:

• Organ damage: heart disease, overproductive pancreas, colon cancer
• Muscle degeneration: mushy abs, tight hips, limp glutes
• Leg disorders: poor circulation, soft bones
• Back problems: inflexible spine, disc damage, strained neck, sore shoulders and back
• Foggy brain: Brain function slows when we are sedentary for a long time.

The Mayo Clinic adds to that list:

• Obesity and metabolic syndrome: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, a bigger waistline, abnormal cholesterol levels

We can just hope that our readers are reading our online messages on their iPhones while standing at the checkout counter at Whole Foods — and not on the lounge chair in front of the TV.

Not what we mean by ‘killer copy’

In this environment — where reading your message can be detrimental to your readers’ health — how can you get the word out online?

Make it easy on the reader. When it comes to online writing, get to the point faster, organize better, make it easier to read and make your web content more skimmable.

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Have you seen the piece about the orphan baby kangaroo and wombat who become BFFs? They also have a baby wallaby friend. Because of course they do.

Awwwww.

It’s obvious why these bundles of joey are making the rounds on Facebook. But how can you use the same approaches to make your content marketing messages travel the world, while others just languish on the couch?

Write a blog post that’s positive and emotional, suggest Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, two professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

Make messages positive, emotional.

Together, Berger and Milkman reviewed some 7,000 articles that appeared in The New York Times to determine what distinguished pieces that made the most-mailed list.

After controlling for placement, timing, author popularity and gender, and story length and complexity, they found that two features determined an article’s success:

• How positive its message was. Positive messages are more viral than negative ones.
• How much emotion it incites. The more extreme the emotion, the more likely it is to move people to act. Messages that make people angry, for instance, are more likely to be shared than those that make people sad.

Articles that evoked emotion — “Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies” — got shared much more on social media than those that did not, such as “Teams Prepare for the Courtship of LeBron James.”

And happy emotions (“Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love with the City”) outperformed sad ones (“Maimed on 9/11, Trying to Be Whole Again.”)

Spread the word

What characteristics make online messages go viral?

Characteristics that go viral

Increase your chances of going viral by increasing these characteristics of your blog post:

Anger

This emotion is 34% more likely to go viral. That’s equivalent to spending an additional 2.9 hours as the lead story on NYTimes.com. And that’s nearly four times the average number of hours articles spend in that position.

Sample headline:

What Red Ink? Wall Street Paid Hefty Bonuses

That makes anger the No. 1 technique for getting your target audience to read your blog posts and pass them on. Show how your organization solves the problems that make readers angry with these techniques:

• Don’t be afraid of fear appeals.
• Make ’em sick, make ’em well.

Awe

This emotion is 30% more likely to go viral:

Rare Treatment Is Reported to Cure AIDS Patient

The Promise and Power of RNA

That makes awe the No. 2 emotion we can tap to make messages go viral (after only anger) is awe. Call it The Awwwww Factor.

So how can you make your messages as awe-inspiring as little orphan animal stories?

• Write about animals. Do you have a Ben the Bear story in your organization?
• Write about people. Try human-interest stories.
• Tell stories. Storytelling is the most effective way to add positive emotion to your content.

Practical value

This emotion is 30% more likely to go viral:

Voter Resources

It Comes in Beige or Black, but You Make It Green

Write how-to stories, tipsheets and news readers can use to live their lives better.

Interest

This emotion is 25% more likely to go viral:

Love, Sex and the Changing Landscape of Infidelity

Anxiety

This emotion is 21% more likely to go viral:

For Stocks, Worst Single-Day Drop in Two Decades

Emotionality

This characteristic is 18% more likely to go viral:

Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness

When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next

Surprise

This characteristic is 14% more likely to go viral:

Passion for Food Adjusts to Fit Passion for Running

Pecking, but No Order, on Streets of East Harlem

Positivity

This characteristic is 13% more likely to go viral:

Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love with the City

Tony Award for Philanthropy

HubSpot viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella found similar results from his research.

Zarrella used TweetPsych to analyze more than 100,000 accounts. He found that negative remarks — references to sadness and aggression, negative emotions and feelings, and morbid comments — correlate with fewer followers. (What a shock!)

“As it turns out, nobody likes to follow a Debbie Downer,” Zarrella writes. “Accounts with lots of followers don’t tend to make many negative remarks. If you want more followers, cheer up!”

Sadness

This characteristic is 16% less likely to go viral:

Web Rumors Tied to Korean Actress’s Suicide

Germany: Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies

Maimed on 9/11, Trying to Be Whole Again

___

Source: Jonah Berger and Katherine l. Milkman, “What Makes Online Content Viral?” (PDF) Journal of Marketing Research, April 2012, pp. 192-205

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Consider the numbers:

• 43% of people skim blog posts instead of reading them, according to Hubspot.
• 55% of people spent fewer than 15 seconds on an article, ​​according to ChartBeat.
• That means people read about 50 words, on average, of a post, using an average reading rate of 200 words per minute.
• The average blog post is 1,416 words long, according to OrbitMedia.

Which means that audience members read, on average, 3.5% of the words on a post.

They don’t read the text. Instead, their “reading strategy” is to skim.

Beyond blog posts

It’s not just blog posts. People skim and scan text in other online channels and devices, as well:

• How people read on the web: They don’t; so make webpages scannable
• Do people skim, scan, read emails? Just 19% of email newsletters get read thoroughly
• People skim and scan text in online news: Only 25% read word by word
• Eye tracking online shows where people look: Change how people see your page with 6 eye gaze patterns
• People are skimming text on tablets: Insights from Poynter’s EyeTrack study

Which words do they read?

So how do you reach nonreaders with words? Put your message where their eyes are — in the microcontent and display copy.

So which words do they read? Your audience members look at magnetic elements, including:

• Bold-face text
• Callouts
• Captions
• Decks
• Headlines
• Links
• Lists
• Subheads

So put your message where their eyes are — in the display copy.

Pass The Palm Test.

So break up walls of words to make messages look easier to read.

In one study, Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne rewrote a New York Magazine post about New York City restaurants. They added more bullets, bold-faced text, highlighted key words and white space to break up walls of words and make the message look easier to read.

Audience members spent about twice as much time with the original page. But they remembered 34% more of the content on the revised page. But they:

• Understood 12% better
• Remembered 34% more of the piece
• Enjoyed the experience significantly better

Pass The Skim Test.

In another study, Nielsen Norman Group researchers rewrote a New York Times article about Nobel Prize winners. They made the piece significantly more scannable with:

• Subheads
• Bulleted lists
• Highlighted key words

As a result, audience members:

• Spent 3% more time reading the article.
• Understood it 12% better.
• Enjoyed it 7% more.

Not a bad return on a few bullets and bold-faced words!

How can you reach people who skim through your text?

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More than 80 years of readability research demonstrate that short words are easiest to read and understand. In fact, word length is the No. 1 predictor of readability.

We spend a lot of time talking about the magic number of words for blog content and other messages. Should you write longer articles or short posts?

What’s the sweet spot for attention spans? 200 words? 500 words? 2,000 words? And what role do search engines and keyword research play in these decisions.

But the real question about the best word length for blog posts isn’t average word count. It’s the number of characters per word.

Whether you’re writing a longer post or other types of content, keep your word length to five characters or less. (I know you can do it, because The New York Times does it every day.

Here are five ways to keep your words short:

1. Find long words.

Use your word count tool to find the average length of your words in characters. If it’s more than five, you need to cut long words.

Then eyeball your copy and scan for long words. Any word of three syllables or more is a candidate for replacing.

2. Use a better thesaurus.

Substitute shorter words where you can. A thesaurus can help. But don’t use Microsoft Word’s, which seems capable only of identifying longer words as substitutes.

Instead, try Visual Thesaurus, One Look Dictionary’s reverse dictionary or Thsrs (The shorter thesaurus). Enter a long word, like “ironic,” and it gives you a shorter word, like “dry” or “wry.”

3. Write about people doing things.

Think of your sentences as stories with clearly identifiable characters acting concretely, suggests the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Its failure could affect vehicle directional control, particularly during heavy brake application.”

Yes: “You won’t be able to steer when you put on the brakes.”

4. Make subjects characters.

Write about people doing things, not about things doing things, as in this example from the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Our expectation was for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that management interference with the strike or harassment of picketing workers was not permitted.”

Yes: “We expected the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to rule that management could not interfere with the strike or harass picketing workers.”

5. Turn actions into verbs.

Write in verbs, not nouns, suggests the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Growth occurred in Pinocchio’s nose when lies were told by him to Geppetto.”

Yes: “Pinocchio’s nose grew longer when he lied to Geppetto.”

Corollary: Nix nominalizations, or words that turn verbs (like explain) into nouns (like explanation).

6. Write to ‘you.’

Look at how writing directly to the reader streamlines syllables and sentences in this passage from the SEC’s “Plain English Handbook” (PDF):

Before — 5.1 characters per word:

This Summary does not purport to be complete and is qualified in its entirety by the more detailed information contained in the Proxy Statement and the Appendices hereto, all of which should be carefully reviewed.

After — 4.6 characters per word:

Because this is a summary, it does not contain all the information that may be important to you. You should read the entire proxy statement and its appendices carefully before you decide how to vote.

7. Write as you speak.

I often say to participants in my workshops, “You would never, ever say this.” Your voice is a good filter for the words you use in your message.

“Good writing is good conversation, only more so.”

― Ernest Hemingway, American author and journalist famous for his economical, understated style

So pass the “Hey! Did you hear?” test.

Say, “Hey! Did you hear?” Then read your message aloud. If it sounds as if your message logically follows those four one-syllable words, your message is crisp and conversational.

If it sounds like a neurological dissertation, make your words shorter and chattier.

8. Choose one-syllable words.

“Short words are best,” said Winston Churchill, “and old words when short are the best of all.”

Take a tip from Churchill — the only person I know of who slayed Nazis with words — and choose one-syllable words.

9. Choose Anglo-Saxon words.

English has two daddies: the Latin daddy, who spoke in long, abstract, fancy words about ideas, and the Anglo-Saxon daddy, who pointed at a rock and grunted, “ROCK!”

Choose from the Anglo-Saxon side of the family.

“After the Normans invaded England, Latin words became preferred by the country’s royalty, clergy and scholars. Latin words were, and still are, more formal and indirect than their dirt cheap Anglo-Saxon equivalents,” writes Bill Luening, senior editor, The Kansas City Star.

“Anglo-Saxon, the honest language of peasants, packs a wallop. In Anglo-Saxon, a man who drinks to excess is not bibulous but a drunk, a man who steals is not a perpetrator, but a thief, and a man who is follically-impaired is not glabrous, but bald. Direct language is powerful language.”

So make it a drunk, bald thief.

10. Don’t find a euphemism for ‘said.’

“Leave said alone,” writes Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar, The Poynter Institute. “Don’t be tempted by the muse of variation to permit characters to opine, elaborate, cajole, or chortle.”

11. Vary your word length.

“Experiment with melody, rhythm and cadence,” write Michelle Hiskey and Lyle Harris, journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Roy Peter Clark agrees. The senior scholar at the Poynter Institute writes:

“Prefer the simple to the technical; put shorter words and paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity. … [R]eaders will remember how the story sounded and resonated in their heads long after they’ve put [your copy] down.”

12. Pack long words with short words.

The problem with most long words isn’t the words themselves, it’s the fact that people who use long words tend to use a lot of them in a row. Break up those multisyllabic pileups with one- and two-syllable words.

13. Put long words in short sentences.

The top two predictors of readability are sentence length and word length. If your words are on the long side, keep your sentences on the short side.

What’s the best word length for blog posts?

When writing articles, blog posts and other social media content, worry less about whether to write a long article or a short one. To increase social shares and other analytics, produce high-quality content — and keep words short.

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It’s not the survey, silly. Most survey stories fail because they focus on the survey, not on the survey results. Here’s how to organize a successful survey story that focuses on the findings, not on the poll:

Lift survey results off the page.

Start with the display copy:

1. Highlight a fascinating finding in the headline. Tell the story, don’t just tell about the story. Your headline should communicate one key survey result, not just announce that you are releasing those results. Here’s an example from a FleishmanHillard release by John Armato for H&R Block:

HOLY 1040! BATMAN PAYS MORE!

2. Summarize the survey in the deck. Now that you’ve gained reader attention with the fascinating findings, it’s time to summarize the story elements in the deck. From the H&R Block survey story:

Survey of kids’ takes on taxes reveals amusing perceptions, noble priorities and a deep love of TV

I love Armato’s twist on a list there. To cover all the story elements, I’d try to squeeze H&R Block into that deck: “H&R Block survey …”

Set up the survey in the intro.

Start strong.

1. Don’t lead with the survey. Communicate one to three key survey results in the lead.

Armato’s compression of details lead squeezes three fascinating findings into one paragraph:

Notice that Armato doesn’t worry about covering the survey itself in the lead. You don’t need to.

2. Summarize the survey in the nut graph. Now that you’ve shown the fascinating findings, it’s time to introduce the survey itself in a sentence or two:

3. Describe the survey methodology in the background section. Paragraph three is soon enough for this information:

Of course, you’ll want to link to more details for the wonks who want it. Make your methodology, survey questions and full results available, just not in the story itself.

List the survey results in the body.

List three to seven key findings in the body of your survey story. Use a hierarchical structure, moving from most important (or most surprising, or valuable or hilarious …) finding to least. But, to avoid ending with a whimper instead of a bang, finish with your second-most-important finding.

Wind up in the conclusion.

1. Transition to the end in the wrapup. What interesting finding can you use to wind the story down?

2. Circle back to the lead in the kicker. Leave a lasting impression with a concrete, creative, provocative final paragraph.

Survey the scene.

Survey stories are a staple of content marketing writing. Use this structure to make the most of your survey reports.

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