People Don’t Read Online—They Scan. This Is How to Write for Them Scanning is searching. Reader’s behavior when scanning may seem pure laziness, but it’s not. It’s an efficient strategy to seek out and filter information. Scanning also allows readers to avoid informational overload.

How writing reframes our knowledge and drives our decisions. Our message is effectively drowning in a sea of organizational and semantic noise that is part and parcel of the product itself. how do we make this easier on the user? Nope… not empathy. Writing. Writing about anything presupposes some degree of understanding of the context.

"Easy writing makes hard reading" - Ernest Hemingway "The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty" - John Steinbeck

Five texts that explain how to write simply and well: 1 Politics and the English Language - 2 Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace - 3 On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction - 4 The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century - 5 Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

An examination of translating text to make it as accessible as possible. Looking at how to make writing easier to read

Easy-to-read information is important for people with intellectual disabilities. It is important so they can: Learn new things. Take part in society. Know their rights and stand up for them. Make their own choices.

Financial writing is full of jargon and complexity. But a series of research suggests that investors are drawn to simple, clear writing with short sentences. The simple reason is that complex writing is off-putting — people tune out and find it dull, a fact confirmed by neuroscience research.

Aaron Berman shared some useful writing tips for anyone writing on complex issues that he learned writing the (US) President's Daily Briefs. Check out the five tips below, illustrated with examples from Star Wars and Star Trek.

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to write and present information that aligns with users’ needs and online reading behaviors.

...from news media to legal guidance to academic research, the way we write often creates barriers to who can read it. Plain language—a style of writing that uses simplified sentences, everyday vocabulary, and clear structure—aims to remove those barriers.

Plain language and website fonts affect the reading experience more than you think

The reasons behind management gobbledygook

Take a tip from the Times. Write headlines that: Average 8 or 9 words Never grow longer than 14 words Sometimes have as few as four words

Clarity, not creativity, is the backbone of good UX writing. Choose simple words and craft shorter sentences. Explain acronyms users might not know. Use proper punctuation. Be extra careful about things like cleverness, wordplay, and idioms that might affect usability. Above all, write to be understood.

"Users rarely read an entire webpage. That means you need to adopt a different style when writing for the web. A style that accommodates this lack of attention."

"understand the digital reader’s brain, and to get a couple of concrete writing tips for your next digital text." "Nothing can surpass a text when it comes to transforming abstract thoughts into concrete expression."

The “known-new contract” is a linguistic concept used to describe how writers achieve cohesion between sentences by first presenting what readers already know (information previously presented) before introducing new information.

"If you can write a half decent document you may be mistaken for thinking writing for the web will be easy. However, the web requires a focus of writing rarely needed elsewhere."

Writing tips from "Writing for the European Commission web presence"

From now, house style guide recommends terms such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’

Gerry McGovern on skills needed for digital communication people. For example: - choose the right word to drive action; - make it easy finding content allowing users to complete a task quickly; - design for maintenance and evolution; - love metadata, be an information architect. I wished I had all of those.

People do not read online: "fundamental scanning behaviors remain constant, even as designs change."

"The Huffington Post is the third most popular online news site, after only Yahoo! News and Google News. They must be doing something right!"

"Plain Language For Everyone, Even Experts" (video)

Chunking is a concept where text and multimedia content is broken up into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.

Cheap storage. Cheap processing power. Cheap energy. It’s all great. We don’t have to think. We just dump our content onto the website and let search engines figure it out.

Reading long sentences (online), your readers not only don’t know what they’ve read, they also forget where they parked the car. Write short sentences like the Times.

Precise communication in a handful of words? The editors at BBC News achieve it every day, offering remarkable headline usability.