It’s the communicator’s biggest problem: How do you get audience members to pay attention to, understand and remember your messages when they’re burdened with so much information?

Your readers receive the data equivalent of 174 newspapers, ads included, daily. With this much information every day, how do you cut through the clutter of competing messages?

The problem with information overload, as Bertram Gross taught us, is that your readers’ processing capacity goes down as the amount of information goes up. When people struggle to manage information, not only are they unable to find the most important information — they also forget where they parked their cars.

How can you overcome information overload to get the word out in your blog posts, social media, internal communications and more? Try these techniques to deal with information overload:

6 paradoxes for breaking through the clutter

What do you do when information overload occurs? Martin J. Eppler and Jeanne Mengis recommend these six “paradoxes” for presenting information that breaks through the clutter:

1. Familiar surprise. Grab audience members’ attention in an intriguing, yet accessible, way. You might try an interesting subject line, a clever lead or an unusual graphic.
2. Detailed overview. Before diving into the details, let your audience members know what they’ll learn from this piece. You might provide context and an overview in a summary after the headline.
3. Flexible stability. Don’t make audience members learn new formats and structures to get your information. Standardized website and memo formats and information mapping help audience members find what they’re looking for faster.
4. Simple complexity. Just shaving more words off your message doesn’t solve information overload. You also need to make the information more understandable. Visual and verbal metaphors clarify complex concepts; they help audience members understand new information by linking it to familiar ideas.
5. Concise redundancy. Deliver information in multiple formats to reach different information consumers. You might present information through statistics, analogies and examples in an article, for instance, or visually and verbally in a meeting.
6. Unfinished completeness. Get audience members involved in the message with comments, polls and questions at the ends of articles. When audience members participate in a message rather than just consuming it, they understand it better and remember it longer.

Find Eppler and Mengis’s work in “Preparing Messages for Information Overload Environments.” That’s a report of the International Association of Business Communicators’ Research Foundation.

Note that cutting word count does not make this list.

Surprise gets attention.

Why is surprise so effective at overcoming information overload in communication?

Our brains are designed to notice changes so we can react to danger.

“Surprise jolts us to attention,” write Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. “Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred. When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.”

How do you create a surprising message? Chip and Dan Heath offer this three-step process:

1. Start with your key message.
2. Figure out what’s counterintuitive about that message. What are the unexpected implications?
3. Craft your message to focus on this “uncommon sense.”

To make surprise effective, make it “postdictable” — i.e., predictable after the fact. Think “Sixth Sense,” not “Black Swan.”

How to? Make sure your surprise is key to your core message. Communicate, don’t decorate.

Surprise gets attention. Curiosity keeps attention.

Increase your return on information.

In 1989, systems scientist Russell Ackoff created a hierarchy of information, from least valuable to most:

• Data
• Information
• Knowledge
• Understanding
• Wisdom

Despite this, most organizations still invest the bulk of their resources on gathering and moving data, the least on wisdom.

That’s expensive. It wastes time.

Is your copy just adding to the pile of facts — data — in your organization? Or is your piece of information likely to help your audience members find knowledge and understanding?

To increase your rate of return on information, consider Ackoff’s hierarchy before you press Send. Is your copy just adding to the pile of facts — data — in your organization? Or is your message likely to help your audience members find knowledge and understanding?

As this data deluge threatens to engulf your workplace, your company needs communicators who add value to information. They need people who translate instead of regurgitate, who inform instead of disseminate.

Do that, and you can serve as an organizational alchemist who transforms a flood of facts into a stream of knowledge. Wisdom, even.

And that’s the gold standard of the Information Age.

‘Be a complexity reducer, not an information producer’

Diane Gayeski, Ph.D., once found that a restaurant chain gave managers four to six hours’ worth of information to process each day. (That, alas, is not Gayeski’s most startling statistic, just the handiest.)

Gayeski, CEO of Gayeski Analytics, helps companies figure out how much time they’re asking employees to spend processing information.

After watching her clients’ employees deal with a huge amount of information, Gayeski came up with this rule of thumb for communicating:

“Be a complexity reducer, not an information producer.”

That would make a great job description for communicators.

Which role are you playing for your audience?

How can you make sure you’re cutting through the clutter, instead of contributing to it? One approach is to do less, but do it better.

This suggestion flies in the face of current communications cultures. There, writers and editors are expected to produce a website, weekly newsletters, daily updates and hourly news flashes for each audience they serve. (Test: When you check your inbox, how do you feel about getting yet another corporate message?)

Don’t get sucked into the system. Remember, nobody wants more information. (According to the Pew Research Center, they especially dislike corporate communications.) They just want better information.

One solution? Perform triage on your work:

1. Prioritize your efforts around business objectives. That’s a quick way to filter relevant information from irrelevant information.
2. Spend the most time on top-priority items. That will help you with day-to-day project management as well as information overload in the workplace.
3. Do a moderate job on mid-priority tasks.
4. Hack out low-priority projects. Can you get by with five Ws and an H?

Even better: Decline low-priority projects that don’t further business objectives. (The best communicators have created a culture where they can do so. One’s even created management software to help.)

The alternative? In addition to contributing to information overload, you’ll condemn yourself to a career of mediocrity.
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Sources: “The Too-Much Information Age,” Seed Magazine, January/February 2008

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, 2007

Managing of organizations

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Note to self: “Label headline” is not a headline.

Label headlines like Label headlines carry a double problem. They skip the verb, so they suck the action out of your headline. And they don’t say anything about the topic.

That’s why serious communicators and publications like The New York Times avoid them. We analyzed 99 headlines in one edition of the Times, skipping the sports pages. Of those, just 7% were label heads.

Yet the most common type of headline I review as a writing coach is — by far! — a label headline. I’m convinced that most corporate communications, marketing and content marketing headlines are label headlines.

What’s a label headline?

Good news headlines “need at least two things … a noun and a verb.”

— Mary Pretzer, design columnist, Editor’s Workshop newsletter

This subhead could have said “Label headline definition.” But that would be a label subhead.

Label heads are those that identify the topic but don’t say anything about it. They are nouns or noun phrases without verbs.

“Every good title is a short story.”

— Russell Banks, American writer of fiction and poetry

Examples of label headlines

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

Bulletins

Meetings

Volunteers

Chemical update

Manager’s letter

Field distribution

Graphics systems

Strategy Statement

Tornado Chase Q&A

US Recruiting Trends

Health considerations

Disposable air cleaners

COBRA/HIPAA Process

Improvement by Transformation

Innovation & Growth Video Series

First-ever 3D virtual retinal display

A New Target in Healthcare Marketing

Systems Integration and Testing Facility

Modification to the NSA mission and vision

Manager’s guide to selecting a proxy or delegate

And … drum roll, please: The worst label head I’ve ever seen was on a sales letter encouraging me to increase the size of a directory ad. The headline:

Sales Letter

Why avoid headlines like Sales Letter when your headline tops, say, a sales letter?

Why avoid label headlines?

“Lose your reader with your headline, and you’ve lost the reader altogether.”

— Alan Sharpe, business-to-business direct-mail copywriter

Why avoid label heads? With label headlines, you:

1. Miss the chance to communicate. Headlines get twice the attention of text. They change the way we think. “Readers” might not read anything else. If your headline says nothing, you’ve missed your best opportunity to reach and sway the huge and growing percentage of your audience who just read the display copy.
2. Make your story dull and boring. While some readers get all of their information from the display copy, others use headlines to decide whether to read. If your headline says Strategy statement, I can almost assure you that readers will choose not to dive in.
3. Sap the energy from your story. Without verbs, your story has no action. Without verbs, there are no benefits. Readers can’t see what they could do differently with your product, service, program or idea.

How to fix label headlines

“Nouns are important, but the nouns must do something.”

— Pete Hamill, novelist, essayist and journalist

How can you fix label headlines?

1. Say something about the topic. If you find yourself writing “headlines” like “Graphic systems,” ask yourself “Graphic systems what?” Or “What about Graphic systems?” Are we for them? Against them? Should I get one if I don’t have one? Should I get rid of one if I do?
2. Add a verb. “A story is a verb, not a noun,” writes one of the former editors of The New York Times. That means that something essential is missing from a label head. Unless you’re writing a feature headline, use a dynamic verb in every headline. Bonus points for putting that verb in present tense.
3. Develop creative standing heads. You may want to use a label for the name of a recurring column or department. But surely, given all your talent and education, you can come up with something better than “Bulletins” or “Manager’s Letter.”

I’d like to buy a verb, please.

So 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

Instead of:

Eighty two million and counting

Write:

245 XYZ employees take on the Global Corporate Challenge

Teams walk 82 million steps in 100 days

Instead of:

XYZ Talks registration — Behind the scenes at the Hermitage

Write:

Go behind the scenes at the Hermitage

 Learn about Russia’s treasured art collection at XYZ Talks on Oct. 10

Instead of:

HPV and throat cancer

Write:

HPV virus? You could be at risk for throat cancer

Get a free screening, answers to your questions, on April 16

Instead of:

Weather Update

Write:

Work from home tomorrow!

Please stay safe and warm during Detroit’s snow emergency, parking ban

See what a difference a verb makes? Stop labeling the topic of your blog post, article or content marketing piece. Start using your headline to actually say something about your story.

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So much for the SEC’s new rules requiring companies to write more clearly about executive compensation.

This year’s compensation discussion and analysis (CD&A) sections — the first crop created under the new SEC mandate — are almost impossible to read.

“Many shareholders say the new proxies require more work, not less, to decipher,” writes Eric Dash, an economics reporter for The New York Times.

“Pay consultants say some of the new data is so dizzying that they are not sure how to sift through it; some charts even require another set of charts to interpret them. And a new section in proxies, meant to explain clearly how executives are compensated, is overrun with mind-numbing corporate-speak and legalese.”

Lynn E. Turner, a former S.E.C. chief accountant, agrees.

“‘It’s like reading through Tolstoy’s War and Peace,'” the managing director of research at Glass, Lewis & Company, a proxy research firm in San Francisco, told The New York Times.

‘What is missing is a clear, succinct story about how the compensation committee came to the amount they were going to pay.'”

Like reading Harvard Law Journal

In fact, the reports are as dense as academic papers, according to Clarity! Communications’ analysis of 40 companies’ CD&As. Using three common readability metrics, the tests showed that:

• The median length was 5,472 words. The shortest was 1,500 words; the longest, more than 13,500 words. A 13,500-word piece would take the average American more than an hour to read (though it might take longer to understand).
• The average CD&A used complex words — words of three syllables or more — nearly one-third of the time.
• The average Gunning-Fox index score came in at 16.45, about the same as an academic paper.
• The average Flesch Reading Ease score was 34.86 — about the same as the Harvard Law Journal. Only about one-third of American adults can read at this level, according to The Accessibility Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
• The average Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level was 11.41, or “fairly difficult.” However, the test Clarity! used only goes up to grade 12. So the real average is likely higher: 13 CD&As reached the highest grade level possible on the test.

What happened to transparency?

“It’s somehow fitting that officials use a big, foggy word like ‘transparency’ when what they really mean is ‘not lying’ and ‘not hiding what we’re really doing.’ But that doesn’t sound as nice or vague, does it?” writes John Schwartz in The New York Times.

“But now that the disclosure forms are rolling in, experts say that if anything, the S.E.C. has achieved opacity. There is so much information that you can’t see the forest for the non-tax-qualified deferred compensation. The disclosure forms run dozens of pages, with so much swirling data and paper that they form a cloud, like the foil chaff that fighter jets drop to confound radar.”

Schwartz describes the disclosure forms as running “dozens of pages, with tables, footnotes and the kind of language that makes your hair hurt.”

Does your copy make your readers’ hair hurt? Find out by using three readability tests.

SEC calls for clearer writing

Proxy statements have become so complex that investors need “a Sherpa guide and a magnifying glass” to figure out what companies spend on executive compensation, according to investor groups.

Now the SEC is mandating that companies write more clearly about executive compensation. That’s information that has too often been hidden in the fine print or obscured by vague language in the past, critics say.

Want to make sure readers can find your point without a Sherpa and magnifying glass? Download the SEC’s fine, free guide to clear writing, “A Plain English Handbook.”

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Sources: Eric Dash, “Executive Pay: A Special Report; More Pieces. Still a Puzzle,” The New York Times, April 8, 2007

“Readability of Executive Compensation Disclosures,” Clarity! Communications, March 1, 2007

John Schwartz, “Executive Pay: Essay; Transparency, Lost in the Fog,” The New York Times, April 8, 2007

Jonathan Peterson and Kathy M. Kristof, “More Data on Pay at the Top Is Mandated The SEC votes to require more-detailed, ‘plain English’ disclosure of executive compensation,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2006

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Why make copy clearer and more readable?

In “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” two researchers at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) list these reasons:

• Messages are becoming more complex.
• Attention spans are shrinking.
• Audience members have learned to expect clearer communications.
• People sometimes accuse organizations of deliberately obfuscating information.

6 fallacies of complex communication

Why, then, do we persist in muddying our messages? One reason, the authors say, may be that we believe that complex communications are more:

• Authoritative
• Immune to criticism
• Complete
• Appealing to approvers
• Sophisticated
• Credible

Problem is, write authors Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D, and Nicole Bischof, these assumptions “are based on the premise that the receivers of a complex message will blame themselves for not understanding it.”

And that’s not true in this information-rich world, where if you don’t communicate the message clearly, someone else will.

Besides, write Eppler and Bischof, years of research on persuasive communications show that messages are credible and convincing only if audience members connect with them. And nobody connects with overly complicated information.

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Source: Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D., and Nichole Bischof, “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” University of St. Gallen, November 2011

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