Quick! Which of these paragraphs would you rather read? This 11-word paragraph, from The New York Times?

Until then, Mr. Stratton waits and continues his daily balancing act.

Or this 146-word paragraph from an Amazon release?

Paragraphs are visual cues.

That’s the problem with long paragraphs: Readers make decisions about your message based not on what you said or on how well you said it but on what it looks like after you’ve said it.

“Long paragraphs are a visual predictor that a story won’t work.”

— Jon Ziomek, associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism

And paragraph length is one of your message’s most important visual cues.

“Long paragraphs are a visual predictor that a story won’t work,” says Jon Ziomek, associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism.

So how long is too long for a paragraph?

Write like the Times.

We turned to The New York Times to find out. We analyzed 99 stories in a single edition of the paper. (We skipped the sports pages.) On that day, the Times’ paragraph length:

• Ranged from 9.6 to 67.5 words long
• Averaged 36 words per paragraph.
• Weighed in at a median of 37 words per paragraph.

Why are PR paragraphs so long?

PR pros: Take a tip from the Times and make your paragraphs short and sweet. Avoid long PR paragraphs like this 108-word paragraph from an SBA release:

And this 126-word paragraph from Fabletics:

If your paragraphs are 100 and 200 words long, readers will skip them. Instead break up longer paragraphs into shorter paragraphs.

Still concerned about the old hard-and-fast rule of thumb for paragraph construction for academic writing that you learned in English class? A good paragraph has a topic sentence, three developing sentences and a concluding sentence?

This ain’t academic writing! Good writers write press release and blog-post paragraphs that get read. Need a line break? Hit return more often. (Add that to your style guide!)

Make ’em punchy.

While you’re at it, why not break up your copy with some super-short paragraphs like these from the Times, which weigh in at …

16 words

And yet Mr. Monis had repeatedly come to the attention of community leaders and the authorities.

14 words

Its broadband package is also the home to the sports broadcaster ESPN in Britain.

13 words

Glen Hauenstein, Delta’s chief revenue officer, was running with the theme last week.

12 words

In February, the activist investor raised its bid to $21 a share.

11 words

“No matter what I did, I couldn’t find peace,” he said.

9 words

Apple could pay more than $350 million in damages.

Now, those are paragraphs that go down easy.

What’s your average paragraph length?

How long should the lead paragraph be?

“‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ The creation of the universe has a 10-word lead! So why do you need 40 words to say that your chief accountant has just completed the necessary certification? The answer, of course, is you don’t.”

— John McIntyre, copy desk chief of the Baltimore Sun

Yet PR pros keep cranking out leads like this 99-word one from an Amazon release:

How long should PR leads be?

Keep your release and pitch lead to 25 words — a couple of sentences — or so.

Longer, and it starts looking too thick to encourage readership.

Shorter, and news portals might not recognize it as a lead paragraph — or your release as a release. Google News, for instance, rejects releases that are nothing but bullet points and one-sentence paragraphs. Advisory releases often get rejected for this reason.

To avoid this, start with a “real” paragraph that includes at least two sentences.

Limit the background in the lead.

One way to take the lead out of the lead: Limit the background to no more than six words.

Background information is any parenthetical information — information that appears between commas, parentheses or dashes, like this phrase — including:

• People’s titles or ages after their names: (“Chris Smith, 29, proofreading guru, says …”)
• Boilerplate descriptions of your company or products (“RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, is now available …”)
• Stock exchange symbols (“Apple Inc. (AAPL) today announced that …”)

That doesn’t mean that these things aren’t important or that you won’t include them in your piece. Just be selective with what and how much you put in the lead. Then move the rest down.

You want your lead to clip along quickly. But background information slows the top of the story down.

If the verb is the story in news releases (and it is), the story (weak though it may be) in this Guardian release got buried under 28 words, 20 of them background information:

Now, that story is a far cry from the creation of the universe. But that lead is nearly six times as long.

Start with a bang.

And make the most of those first few words. Otherwise, you’ll lose journalists.

“If the copy doesn’t excite me within 20 words, I won’t read the rest of it,” says one editor quoted by Jack Appleman, president of SG Communications.

Here, by the way, are the first 20 words of that Amazon release:

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that it has contracted with EDP Renewables to construct …

Snooooooooooooooze.

The post What’s the ideal paragraph length for press releases? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Online readers read shallow and deep, according to The Stanford Poynter Project: Eye Movement on the Internet, a study by Stanford University and The Poynter Institute.

So how can you give your in-depth “divers” enough information without overwhelming your casual “surfers”?

“The Internet is for everybody,” write Daniel A. Cirucci and Mark A. Tarasiewicz of the Philadelphia Bar Association. “It’s for the 30-second reader, the three-minute reader, the 30-minute reader and even the three-hour junkie.”

So how do you serve all these groups?

Write for three audience groups.

Present each message for:

• Lookers, who may give you 10 seconds. Get these folks’ attention with a sharp headline and large image.
• Skimmers, who may give you 30 seconds. Reach them through display copy: headlines, decks, subheads, links and bold-faced lead-ins, for instance.
• Readers, who may give you 2 minutes. These folks may read the paragraphs.

Writing for the Web author Crawford Kilian calls them:

• Viewers, “those looking for entertainment, who think dancing boloney is fun”
• Users, “those who go to the web to get information they need for specific purposes”
• Readers, “those who are willing to put up with poor screen resolution so that they can actually read something that interests them”

And branding guru Bob Killian suggests writing for three groups:

1. Quals, or people who just want to hear your brand story plus maybe one proof point. They make up 86% of your human audience, Killian estimates, and 86% of your best prospects, as well.

“When they land on your home page, they’ll give you 4.5 seconds to make clear we-make-widgets-that-wiggle, and we-ship-globally-in-24-hours. (One defining story, one meaningful differentiator),” he writes. “If the first paragraph is ten lines long, they bail out. If you layer on 10-reasons-why, they … bail out.”

2. Quants, or folks people who also want to know your proofs and processes.

Quants “will read the nutrition chart on the peanut butter jar, read the prospectus, read the insurance policy, and so on,” Killian writes.

“They want more than your story; they want drill-down data about ingredients, processes, testimonials, proof statements of any kind – they’ll even sit still for 10 reasons why. These data points can’t be ignored since they are 14% of your human visitors.”

3. Bots, or search engine robots. They’re looking for the same level of detail as the Quants.

How do you reach all of these folks?

Write shallow, deliver deep.

For the web, you may need to write shorter, making each web page as tight as possible. But you also need to deliver longer pieces for your deep divers.

“Open with kernels for the 30-second reader,” write Cirucci and Tarasiewicz. “Break to bits for the three-minute reader. Branch to detail for the 30-minute reader. Link to verbal and visual feasts for the three-hour junkie.”

As Eric Morgenstern, president and CEO of Morningstar Communications, counsels, offer your readers:

• USA Today level
• Wall Street Journal level
• Harvard Business Review level

Let them choose.

Or, if you, like I, are more inclined to favor a bacon analogy, think of these layers as:

• Amuse bouche
• Appetizer
• Entree

Or, as one PR pro (whose name I’ve lost) put it:

• Bite
• Snack
• Meal

For an executive speech, for instance, you might offer:

• A headline and summary blurb on the homepage
• A one-page summary of speech highlights
• The full text of the speech
• The speech in streaming audio and video

Visitors can surf as shallowly or dive as deeply as they prefer.

“There’s a story to make obvious, and drill-down stuff to make available,” Killian says. “Never confuse the two.”

Move readers up the attention ladder.

The good news is, you may be able to move these folks up the ladder of attention. If the 10-second view is interesting enough, you might turn a looker into a skimmer. If the display copy delivers real value, you might turn a skimmer into a reader.

But even if you don’t move visitors up the attention ladder, you need to reach each group where they are. You need to write for all of your readers.

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