Readers are busy. Fluff takes space. Space takes time. So let’s cut the fluff and get on with it.

To cut the fluff, aim for a fact-to-fluff ratio of at least 1:1.

How do you find your ratio?

Pass the yellow highlighter/red pen test.

Try this test:

1. Highlight all your abstract claims, ideas and concepts with a yellow highlighter.
2. Underline all your concrete evidence — fun facts, juicy details, examples, anecdotes, case studies, statistics and so forth — with a red pen.

What should your copy look like? At least as much red as yellow.

Remember what Texans say about people who are “all hat, no cattle.” Too many pieces of corporate web pages are just that — puffy, overblown chest pounding with little solid evidence to back up the claims.
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What does most corporate web copy look like? A sea of yellow broken only by the occasional speck of red.

To improve your ratio:

1. Increase fact. Add “proof” in the form of hard evidence — statistics, analogies, facts, examples, stories, testimonials — to all your claims.
2. Reduce fluff. Cut hyperbole, adjectives, adverbs and other puffy prose. Strip your copy of “marketingese.”

Here’s how:

1. Increase fact.

What convinces people to do business with your website? According to research by the Nielsen Norman Group, it’s facts, not fluff:

1. Level of detail: 41%
2. Layout: 16.7%
3. Visual design: 14.5%
4. Features: 8.2%
5. Tone: 6.8%
6. Deals: 4.4%
7. Price: 3.8%
8. Can’t be classified: 2.7%
9. Brand: 1.9%

“Visitors overwhelmingly prefer detail. But they don’t want to be overwhelmed by it,” says Kate Meyer, user experience specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.

If your web page is seriously lacking in the kind of detail that makes visitors want to work with you, increase fact.

Make like a lawyer. Prove your claims. Dig up concrete details — numbers, comparisons, examples and third-party testimonials, for instance — to prove your assertions.

Remember what Texans say about people who are “all hat, no cattle.” Too many pieces of corporate web pages are just that — puffy, overblown chest pounding with little solid evidence to back up the claims.

Don’t let that describe your web page.

2. Reduce fluff.

The second way to improve your fact-to-fluff ratio: Reduce fluff.

“The more florid the descriptions, the more users tune them out and go elsewhere. Sadly, the web is so smothered in vaporous content and intangible verbiage that users simply skip over it.” — Jakob Neilsen, principal, Nielsen Norman…
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Cut hyperbole, adjectives, adverbs and other puffy prose. Strip out “marketingese.”

This promotional language reduces reading, according to Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, in How People Read on the Web.

So:

• Cut hyperbole. Minimize modifiers.
• Avoid marketingese and other empty, puffy prose.
• Present information without exaggeration, subjective claims, or boasting.

That’s important.

“The more florid the descriptions, the more users tune them out and go elsewhere. Sadly, the web is so smothered in vaporous content and intangible verbiage that users simply skip over it,” writes Jakob Neilsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group.

“The more bad writing you push on your users, the more you train them to disregard your message. Useless content doesn’t just annoy people; it’s a leading cause of lost sales.”

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Here’s an interesting dichotomy: Killing time is the killer app for mobile devices. But mobile users are in a hurry and “get visibly angry” at verbose sites that waste their time.

Why?

“Even relaxation is purposeful behavior,” according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen. “In information foraging theory, users seek to maximize their cost/benefit ratio. That is, people want more thrills and less interaction overhead.”

Sadly, interaction costs are inherently greater in mobile — all that swiping and scrolling and trying to remember what you can’t see on the screen adds up.

“Tolerance of padding on mobiles is a lot lower,” counsels the BBC in its writing news for mobile screens guidelines. “So people are even quicker to drop out. You have to get their attention instantly; grab them from the first sentence. It’s too easy to click away.”

So how do you give mobile readers more thrills and less interaction overhead? Cut the blah-blah. Readers won’t put up with filler on their phones.

Cut the blah-blah.

Nielsen once saw this electronic sign in an airport hotel lobby:

Really?! you might ask. This flight monitor will actually … monitor flights?

“Because the monitor’s meaning is obvious to anyone who has ever been on an airplane, the sign adds nothing,” Nielsen says. “Worse, it wastes people’s time as they ponder the cycling text, assuming that it will eventually say something important.”

After all, Nielsen points out, the sign could just say:

Avoid information pollution.

Call it information pollution — “excessive word count and worthless details” that make it hard for people to get good information.

Information pollution not only wastes time, it steals audience attention.

“Each little piece of useless chatter is relatively innocent, and only robs us of a few seconds,” Nielsen says. “The cumulative effect, however, is much worse: we assume that most communication is equally useless and tune it out, thus missing important information that’s sometimes embedded in the mess.”

So cut the fluff.

“In particular, ditch the blah-blah verbiage,” Nielsen says. “When writing for mobile users, heed this maxim: If in doubt, leave it out.”

Filler = bad.

Nielsen also sees this kind of “useless chatter” at the tops of many web pages.

“The worst kind of blah-blah has no function; it’s pure filler — platitudes, such as, ‘Welcome to our site, we hope you will find our new and improved design helpful,’” he says.

“Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase.”

Filler of all kinds irritates mobile readers. Consider this response from one participant in Nielsen’s mobile usability studies:

She felt duped because she didn’t get enough payoff from her investment of time and effort.

Cut to the chase.

“Let’s clean up our information environment,” Nielsen says. “Are you saying something that benefits your customers, or simply spewing word count? If users don’t need it, don’t write it. Stop polluting now.”

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How do you squeeze a big idea, more than 18 months of research and input from more than 3,000 constituents into a sound bite that expresses the whole purpose of your organization?

The International Association of Business Communicators found out in developing the organization’s new brand tagline. IABC leaders started with this brand positioning statement:

At 60 words, that sentence is a mouthful. So IABC leaders compressed the positioning statement into a brand promise:

At 23 words, this is a mere sliver of the original text. But it’s still not ready for prime time. So leaders condensed that big idea into a brand tagline of just two words:

Be Heard

And, with a maxim as crisp, clear and compelling as that, that’s what IABC is bound to be.

So how can you condense your big idea into a little space? Whether you’re writing a blog post or a bylined article for The New York Times, summarize your idea into:

The back of a business card

As one of my favorite college professors, R.S. Musser, used to say: “If you can’t summarize your story idea on the back of my business card, you don’t have a clear idea.”

A walkaway sentence

What’s the single sentence you want your readers to walk away with after reading your piece? That’s your story angle.

Keep that sentence to eight words or less, because that’s a length people can grasp fully at a glance, according to the American Press Institute.

An elevator pitch

Say your biggest prospect joins you on the elevator in the lobby. As you zoom up to the third floor, what one thing are you going to tell her about your product, service or idea? That’s your focus sentence.

A tweet

Christopher Smith, corporate writing and editing guru, challenges communicators to summarize their articles in 280 characters or less. This practice not only helps writers find their focus but also reveals what information is essential to your message — and what is not.

A bumper sticker or billboard

How’s this for an efficient story angle: “One if by land, two if by sea.” Of course, legend has it that Paul Revere’s famous eight-word call to action launched the American Revolution.

Can your short point drive your readers to act?

Six words

Decades after Ernest Hemingway famously crafted a six-word story — “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” — to settle a bet, the six-word story format has taken off.

• SMITH Magazine calls for six-word memoirs.
• The Harvard Business Review suggests summing up your leadership style in six words.
• Sixwordstories.net is dedicated to publishing prose in six words. (Some are almost unbearably compelling: “Family’s tears hurt more than chemo.”)

A classified

Seth Godin, marketing guru and author of The Practice, suggests that you write a classified.

“What’s the offer?” he asks. “What do you want me to do? You’re paying by the word!” Because attention is expensive.

Maybe, he says, you’ll write something like:

Lose weight now. Join our gym.

“Six words,” says Godin. “Promise and offer.”

A slogan

Advertising Age’s “Top 10 Slogans of the 20th Century” all weighed in at five words or less:

• Diamonds are forever (DeBeers)
• Just do it (Nike)
• The pause that refreshes (Coca-Cola)
• Tastes great, less filling (Miller Lite)
• We try harder (Avis)
• Good to the last drop (Maxwell House)
• Breakfast of champions (Wheaties)
• Does she … or doesn’t she? (Clairol)
• When it rains it pours (Morton Salt)
• Where’s the beef? (Wendy’s)

Can you summarize your story angle into five words or less? If so, you’ve got a story angle.

Now use your summary sentence.

Your summary sentence will keep you from getting scattered. It will tell you what to put in — and what to leave out of — your copy.

____

Sources: “The IABC Brand: Briefing for IABC Chapters,” International Association of Business Communicators, January 2007

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It feels so good to talk about ourselves.

Talking about yourself activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food, money or sex, according to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her colleague Jason Mitchell, whose research on the topic was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

No wonder some 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about our favorite subject.

Some 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about ourselves. — Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, Harvard researchers
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For the study, Tamir and Mitchell used an MRI scanner to see which parts of the brain responded when people talked about themselves. When participants were sharing their own pizza preferences and personality traits, researchers saw heightened activity in regions of the brain associated with the rewards we get from food, money or sex.

Avoid institutional narcissism.

I don’t know whether institutions also have pleasure centers, but they certainly seem to suffer from the same self-centeredness that afflicts we mere mortals. Consider their messages:

• XYZ Company today announces that …
• Our ABC is the leading doohickey in the blah-blah market …
• At LMNOP, we believe …

The problem with writing about us and our stuff is that, as Tamir and Mitchell’s research shows, your readers don’t want to talk about you. They want to talk about themselves.

So stop We-We-ing on your readers.

Readers don’t want your We-We.

We’ve known since 1934 that readers don’t respond to We-We. That’s the year Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale conducted a study that proved that first-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) reduce readability.

First-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) reduce readability. — Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale
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Fast forward to 2015, when Return Path proved the same thing: People are less likely to open and click through emails with first-person pronouns (I, me, our, mine) in the subject lines.

(I love how we keep “discovering” the same readership habits the classic researchers learned back in the day. These reader traits remain the same — over the decades, across media, throughout channels — because whatever else changes, our readers remain human.)

Top companies 57% less likely to We-We on readers.

No wonder high-performing organizations avoid We-We-ing on their readers. According to IABC UK’s research into how top organizations communicate:

• 71% of high-performing organizations focus on the audience’s point of view in their messaging. Just 45% of average organizations do.
• Top organizations are 60% more likely to focus on the audience perspective in communications than average organizations.
• Some 88% of average organizations say they like to talk about themselves; just 63% of top organizations do.

Focus on the reader’s favorite subject.

Instead of writing about your favorite subject, write about the reader’s.

They’ll love it. They’ll read it. They’ll open it, click through it and retweet it.

And that feels so good.

___

Sources: Robert Lee Hotz, “Science Reveals Why We Brag So Much,” The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2012

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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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Fear appeals persuade. But they can also paralyze.

Strong fear appeals persuade … The stronger the fear appeal, the more likely it is to move your readers to act, according to 50 years of research and 100 studies reviewed by researchers Kim Witte and Mike Allen.

In fact, a well-designed fear appeal should move about 4% of your target audience to act. So if you have 10,000 readers, 400 of them should change their behavior.

Weak fear appeals, on the other hand, don’t move audience members act.

… But they also paralyze. However, write Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini in Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, when you arouse fear without clearly showing how readers can reduce the danger, they may deal with the fear by blocking out the message.

To create a message that persuades your audience without paralyzing them, structure your fear appeal in four parts:

1. Introduce the threat.

The stronger the threat, the more effective the fear appeal. So:

A. Demonstrate the severity of the threat. Professional money managers, for instance, might reach out to trustees with a fear appeal like this:

“Individual trustees who are managing trusts on their own — even those who have appointed an investment advisor in a traditional trust arrangement — are personally responsible to the trust for the performance of those assets.”

B. Describe the threat using vivid word pictures. Illustrate the horrible consequences of the threat, as in this image from the World Wildlife Fund:

“Imagine (a group of dolphins) accidentally entangled in a fishing net, struggling for every single breath as they try to thrash their way to safety.”

C.Pile on references to the threat. Here’s how the Natural Resources Defense Council does it:

The stronger the threat, the more effective it will be.

2. Demonstrate that the reader is at risk.

The more personal the threat, the more effective the fear appeal.

Teenagers, for instance, are likely to be more afraid of bad breath than of cancer from smoking, says researcher Herbert J. Rotfeld. That’s because teens don’t feel personally threatened by mortality; they think it’s something old people get.

For parents who smoke, on the other hand, the strongest fear appeal might be that their children are likely to imitate their parents’ behavior.

So personalize the message. To make your fear appeals more relevant to your readers:

A. Focus on your audience’s risk of the threat. Here’s an example, from Northern Fund’s marketing magazine:

Women are particularly likely to live in poverty in old age: Regardless of their current incomes, one-third to two-thirds of 25- to 55-year-old women could become destitute if they don’t start to prepare for their financial futures now.

B. Emphasize similarities between victims of the threat and the target audience:

Like you, these women had high-paying jobs in their 40s and 50s.

C. Personalize the threat. Bring it home to the reader.

Bottom line: If you’re a woman, you face a 33% chance of living in poverty after you retire.

Avoid the breaking point.

At this point, readers make a decision. If they find the threat irrelevant or insignificant, they’ll ignore your message.

But if they feel susceptible to a serious threat, they’ll start wondering what they can do about it.

That makes this the perfect time to introduce the solution.

3. Demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution.

In one Australian study, researchers found that the audience’s view of the solution outweighed the importance of the threat in the success of a fear appeal.

Call it “response efficacy” — researchers’ term for whether a person believes the solution will actually reduce the risk.

Here’s how it works:

• I believe a biochemical terrorist attack is a real, severe risk. [Severity of threat.]
• I believe I am at risk. [Personalize the risk.]
• But I don’t believe that putting duct tape around my windows is an effective solution. So I opt out. [Effectiveness of solution.]

So don’t blow this off with a one-liner: Develop this section as well as you develop the threat. Outline how, why and when the solution will reduce the risk.

4. Show that readers can perform the solution.

If readers think the solution won’t work or that they can’t implement the solution, they’ll feel it’s futile to try to control the risk.

Then they’ll focus on controlling their fear instead of the threat. They may become defensive: “This is freaking me out. I’m not going to think about it.”

For instance:

• I believe that the cost of spending years in a nursing home can devastate a family’s finances. [Severity of threat]
• I believe my own family’s finances are at risk. [Personal risk]
• I believe that long-term-care insurance would be an effective solution. [Effectiveness of solution]
• I just don’t see how I could afford long-term-care insurance premiums. [My ability to perform solution.]

So demonstrate that your action recommendations are cheap, painless and easy to implement. “Lose 40 pounds,” for instance, isn’t easy. “Substitute a liquid meal replacement for one meal a day” is more achievable.

How can you use this model to develop a four-part fear appeal that persuades, rather than paralyzing, readers.

____

Sources: Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini; Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Free Press, 2009

Kim Witte and Mike Allen, “A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns,” Health Education & Behavior, October 2000

Herbert J. Rotfeld, “There are threats and (maybe) fear-caused arousal: theory and confusions of appeals to fear and fear arousal itself,” Journal of Advertising, Sept. 22, 1997

Richard Tay, Barry Watson and Olivia Radbourne, “The influence of fear arousal and perceived efficacy on the acceptance and rejection of road safety advertising message,” Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference (Regain the Momentum), Melbourne, 2001

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Want to write more readable messages? Increase engagement on your webpages? Otherwise boost your writing skills?

As we plan our upcoming Master Classes, I’ve been creating a lot of new slides. Here’s a sneak peek at some of my favorites.

1. Stop boring them to death. Reach more readers — and sell more products, services, programs and ideas — with storytelling, metaphor and other creative elements. The boss thinks that’s fluff? We’ve got the data to prove it works.

2. Knock out brilliant drafts with less effort. Use a writing process that works with — not against — your brain. Prewrite, write, then rewrite.

3. Engage readers with social posts. “Our readers don’t want to read stories,” writes Brian J. O’Conner, editor of bankrate.com. “What they want is a big button they can push that says, ‘Solve my problem.’ It’s up to us to be that button.”

Write posts that solve their problems. Don’t write about us and our stuff.

4. Use the bait your readers like. That’s my grandfather, George Wylie, serving his famous catfish to Doc Severinsen, the band leader for the “Tonight” show. Grandpa said, “If you want to catch a fish, you need to think like a fish. Then you need to use the bait the fish like, not the bait you like.” So what bait are you using on your readers?

5. Go beyond the subject line. Email recipients consider four elements — aka “the envelope” — when deciding whether to open or delete your message. If you’re not writing them, MailChimp is, and not too well. Increase open rates by addressing all four elements of the envelope.

6. Journalists rank PR quotes as the least valuable thing in a release — below the boilerplate and dateline. So how can you transform lame-ass quotes into snappy sound bites? To write quotes that journalists want to run and that readers want to read, take the Wah-wah out.

7. “This is too easy to read.” Said nobody ever. Nobody wants it to be harder. Use free online tools like HemingwayApp to measure, monitor, manage and improve readability. For all of your audiences. Because readability helps everyone.

8. Write better bulleted lists. Web visitors look at 70% of the bulleted lists they encounter … but only if you do a few things right. So show the parts, show the whole and make lists parallel.

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Think of subheads as the icing on the cake.

Skimmers look at subheads to learn what content you’re offering on a web page, blog post or news release. This creates the layer cake eye-gazing pattern — on an eyetracking heat map, it shows up as a series of horizontal lines.

That helps visitors find what they want quickly.

Without subheads to guide the way, web visitors either skim the first line (or less) of each paragraph in the F-shaped eye-gazing pattern or hunt around for individual words in the spotted pattern. Both of those are inefficient ways for skimmers to find what they want.

“By far, the single most important thing you can do to help users consume content is to use meaningful [subheads], and make [them] visually pop as compared to body text,” write Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, the authors of How People Read on the Web.

“The reader who sees the big parts is more likely to remember the whole story.”

— Roy Peter Clark, The Poynter Institute

Why subheads?

And no wonder. In addition to changing visitors’ eye-gazing patterns, good subheads can help you:

1. Draw readers in. A compelling subhead can turn skimmers into readers.
2. Help people find what they want quickly. Web visitors skim web pages, looking at subheads first to find sections of copy they’re looking for, before reading the paragraphs below.
3. Break copy up. Good subheads break copy up into accessible, bite-sized chunks. And when your message looks easier to read, more people will read it.
4. Keep readers reading. “Subheads increased reading for skimmers and for those whose attention was beginning to wane,” according to The Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack III study.
5. Communicate to nonreaders. Well-written subheads can convey your key ideas to flippers, skimmers and others who won’t read your paragraphs, no matter what.
6. Keep readers on your page. If they can’t find what they’re looking for on your page, they’re likely to go back to Google to find a page that gives them what they want.
7. Help visitors read and understand. Subheads “make it vastly easier for users to read and understand web pages,” Pernice, et al., say.
8. Make your message more memorable. “A writer who knows the big parts can name them for the reader” with subheads, writes Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at The Poynter Institute. “The reader who sees the big parts is more likely to remember the whole story.”

Five more reasons for subheads

Indeed, any story of any significant length should have subheads, says Roy Peter Clark. Clark, The Poynter Institute’s editorial guru, says those subheads can:

1. Create an index for the story
2. Offer a distinctive point of entry into the piece
3. Ventilate the gray page with white space
4. Let the writer test the coherence of the piece
5. Give the reader the global structure of the piece at a glance

This is a job for the writer, not the designer, Clark says. The writer should produce or at least suggest the subheads.

Don’t drop the subheads.

Whatever you do, don’t drop online subheads.

“If you are not calling out sections of your web pages or prose on those pages with subheads, you are making a big mistake!” write Pernice et al. “If you take nothing else [away], please take this: Use subheads and subsubheads.”
___

Source: Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen; How People Read on the Web: The Eyetracking Evidence; Nielsen Norman Group; Sept. 10, 2013

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What’s in a name?

A great headline can mean the difference between a story that gets read — or one that gets passed over.

So what’s the headline formula that will produce compelling headlines that appeal to search engines as well as to your target audience? Whether you’re writing a blog post, news release or social media status update, try these tips for drawing readers in with your headlines:

1. Avoid vague heads.

These are actual headlines that appeared in actual publications:

Prepare for the worst

Help me cope

Keeping it together

These headlines are so vague, they could all apply equally to stories about my husband getting ill, my business going bankrupt or my finding out that the mini-mart is out of Twix bars.

If your headline could apply to any story, you shouldn’t use it for any story. The best headlines are ultra-specific. Write a unique headline for your unique story.

2. Tighten loose heads.

These, too,are actual headlines that appeared in actual publications:

Preparing for the successful sale of your business

(I’m sure there was a more successful way to write this headline.)

What is intellectual property, and why should you care about it?

( I already don’t care about it, because this is such a bad headline.)

Vague heads are less like headlines than story ideas. “I know, let’s do a story on what is intellectual property, and why should you care about it?”

A story idea isn’t a headline. Good headlines take time and effort to write.

3. Reverbify label headlines.

In 1986, The New York TImes ran a column about Canada’s campaign to forge a free-trade deal with the United States. The headline:

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Michael Kinsley, then the editor of The New Republic, declared it to be the most boring imaginable headline.

Label headlines — like Worthwhile Canadian Initiative — are boring. They identify the topic without saying anything about it. They are nouns or noun phrases without verbs.

Here, for example, are a few of the label heads that have crossed my desk lately:

Bulletins

Chemical update

Field distribution

Graphics systems

Strategy statement

With label headlines, you miss the chance to reach the huge and growing percentage of your audience who just read the display copy. You lose readers who rely on headlines to draw them into the story. And you sap the energy from your pieces, because labels have no verbs.

But a headline isn’t just a topic.

Avoid label headlines.

To fix label headlines, say something about the topic, and make sure your subject has a verb.

instead of:

Charity Collection for Geneva and Africa

Write:

Help African orphans, vulnerable children, Manchester’s poor

Donate to XYZ’s autumn charity collection Oct. 15-31

Verbs are power words. Make sure your headline has one.

4. Stop ing-ing.

Who ever decided that “Present Participling Noun” was a clever headline? You’ve seen (maybe even written!) ing-ing headlines like these:

Introducing the Strategic Growth Incentive

Making dams safer for fish around the world

Ending Child Trafficking through Collaboration, Awareness, and Support

So what’s wrong with “Introducing the Strategic Growth Incentive”?

Ing-ing headlines focus on your organization’s actions instead of the reader’s needs. They suck the subject out of the headline. And they substitute present participles — weak nonverbs — for power words, like verbs.

Stop ing-ing.

When you find these headlines in your own copy, rewrite. Use subject, verb, object. Then you’ll end up with power words like stoke, step, shape and turn.

And that will put the energy back in your headline.

5. Skip the buzzwords.

Chris Smith, senior lead communications specialist at Entergy, writes:

Indeed. And if you’ve crammed “strategic,” “value-added,” “proactive,” “solution” and “core competencies” into your headline, it’s a bad headline.

6. Skip ‘headline words.’

Copy editors — who must often squeeze sense into a headline or subject line with very few characters — have developed a vocabulary of super-short words.

You see these terms in headlines, but rarely anyplace else. They’re words like:

• Accord for agreement
• Eyes for sees
• Flap for controversy
• Ink for signs
• Irk for irritate
• Mull for consider
• Nab for steal
• Nix for cancel
• Pact for contract
• Pan for criticize
• Scribe for writer
• Slate for schedule
• Veep for vice president
• Vie for compete
• Weigh for consider
• Woes for miseries
• Woo for persuade

Don’t use these words in your headlines. Instead, steal the idea behind these “headline words.” Use more familiar one-syllable words to develop sharp heads of your own.

7. Don’t drop key elements.

Is there a deadline for responding to your message? Create a sense of urgency with a call to action in the headline.

Are you writing to a subset of your target audience: asthma sufferers, maybe, or single moms? Consider calling out to them in the headline.

If there’s a key element to the story, consider including it in the headline.

8. Don’t make the reader groan.

John Russial, associate professor at the University of Oregon, begs you to stop writing headlines like:

The pear facts about anjous

Plan for a fence at jail has some neighbors railing

Rail plan is … on track … off the track … at a crossroads … going downhill … going uphill … moving at full throttle … huffing and puffing like the little engine that could

And anything taxing around April 15.

9. Avoid confusing the reader.

Books bulge with confusing headlines. Among my favorites:

NFL to ask its players to donate brains for study

Ouch!

Include your children when baking cookies

Yum!

Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25

Yup! Or even after age 20.

Read more ridiculous headlines.

10. Don’t get it wrong.

Read far enough into the body copy to get the headline right. A catchy headline does nothing if the information it relays is incorrect.

“Make sure the big type does not contradict the little type,”  writes Russial.

Here’s one that does contradict the little type, from Inc. magazine:

Hot Tip: Set Cost-Cutting Targets

Head first.

Want to convince people to click to read, increase conversion rates and social shares, boost content marketing results and otherwise improve the ROI on your message? Write more compelling headlines.

Headlines get twice the attention of body copy. They change the way people think. And they’re the gateway to your message.

Lose readers in the headline, and you’ll likely lose them altogether.

The post Avoid these common headline mistakes appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

I’m often amazed at the amount of energy writers put into perfecting the sentence structure in the fourth paragraph of their piece when those same folks toss off a headline in the 17 seconds before happy hour on a Friday afternoon.

The sad truth is, most of your readers will never read the fourth paragraph of your brilliant copy. But many more will read your display copy.

Here’s why:

1. They’re not reading; they’re looking.

Back in the day, web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote one of the first articles on writing for the web. The headline:

How users read on the web

The first paragraph:

They don’t.

“People read paper,” writes T.J. Larkin, principal of Larkin Communications. “They use the web.”

Indeed, 96% of the time people visit your website, they’re looking for something specific, according to a Xerox PARC critical incident study.

They:

• Collect 71% of the time. They’re gathering multiple pieces of information — researching a webinar or blog post, maybe, or trying to find the best refrigerator for their tiny house.
• Find 25%. They’re looking for a specific piece of information, such as the address of a restaurant.
• Explore 2%. We used to call this surfing, or just browsing around the web.
• Monitor 2%. They might return to BBC.com, for instance, to keep up with the latest news.

That makes searching for information the No. 2 mobile task, according to Raluca Budiu and Jakob Nielsen, in User Experience for Mobile Applications and Websites. (No. 1 mobile task: killing time.)

What they’re not doing: reading. In fact, 79% of web visitors scan, according to Sun Microsystems research. Just 16% read word-by-word.

2. They don’t spend much time on your message.

One way we know they’re not reading: They don’t spend enough time with your message to read it.

How much time do they spend?

The average web page visit lasts a little less than a minute, according to 2011 research by the Nielsen Norman Group. (Often, visits last only 10-20 seconds.) That’s enough time, Nielsen figures, to read about 25% of each page.

“People spend less than a minute on content pages,” Nielsen writes, “even when they’re looking at long articles or detailed product specs.”

That’s the good news.

Make that 15 seconds. Some 55% of web visitors spent fewer than 15 seconds on the web pages they visited, according to a 2014 Chartbeat analysis of 2 billion visits across the web.

Filter purely for blog posts or article pages, and “only” 33% of web visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a page.

Figuring that people read about 200 words per minute, at 15 seconds per visit, that’s about 50 words per web page.

Make that 20% of the words on the page, according to research by four professors from two German universities. For the study, the professors fitted 25 European computer scientists, psychologists, sociologists, engineers and other highly educated professionals with eyetracking devices to use while they went about their daily lives.

They collected 50,000 page views, which were then analyzed by the Nielsen Norman Group. From that analysis NNG found that:

• On average, web visitors read half the information on web pages with 111 words or less.
• As the word count goes up, so too does the amount of time visitors spend on a page. But reading time doesn’t keep up with the additional word count. Web visitors spend only 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words. Assuming an average reading time of 200 words per minute, that’s only about 15% of the additional words.
• Web visitors spent enough time to read at most 28% of the words on a web page during an average visit. However, Nielsen says, they don’t spend all that time reading. It’s more likely, he estimates, that visitors read only 20% of the words on the average web page.

How much of your message are they really reading?

3. Their eyes are drawn to display copy

So which words are they reading?

People read the display copy. Eyes are drawn to:

• Headlines
• Decks
• Subheads
• Captions
• Callouts
• Links
• Lists
• Highlighted key words

That’s right. Most of the impact you make on your readers comes, not from the paragraphs itself, but from the display copy.

People look first at photos, headlines and links. Online, readers look at directional devices, such as navigational bars, links and teasers, first, according to The Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack07 study.

Readers of broadsheets (such as The New York Times) look at headlines first. Readers of tabloids (such as the New York Daily News) look at photos first.

Note what doesn’t make the list: Paragraphs.

How are using these primary entry points to pull readers into your message?

Display copy draws eyes in print. Here’s what readers “process,” or see, in print, according to “Eyes On the News,” a study by The Poynter Institute:

• Artwork: 80%
• Photos: 75%
• Headlines: 56%
• Briefs: 31%
• Captions: 29%
• Text: 25% (This number is actually high, the researchers said, because testing prototypes produce better numbers than real publications.)

There’s no doubt about it: The biggest ROI you’re going to get on your writing time and effort in any medium is the work you put into your display copy.

Make the most of your display copy.

With well-written display copy, you can:

• Draw readers in by pointing out interesting facts that can transform flippers and skimmers into readers.
• Break copy up, making it look easier to read. And the easier it looks to read, the more likely people will read it.
• Communicate to nonreaders by lifting your ideas off the page or screen.
• Help readers remember. Average students remember more from reading pieces that include “signaling” devices like display copy than from those that don’t, found reading researcher Bonnie J. F. Meyer in a 1979 study. Use this display copy superpower to cement your ideas in your readers’ heads, as well.

Do you have a system for reaching nonreaders with display copy? If not, how are you reaching the 79% of your visitors who don’t read paragraphs?

The post Why is micro content important? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..