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Here’s an argument for storytelling, if I’ve ever heard one: In a trial to determine whether the defendant, Johnson, was guilty of stabbing another man, Caldwell, to death in a barroom fight, it didn’t matter what evidence lawyers presented as much as how they presented it.… Read the full article
Email newsletter subscribers read word-for-word just 19% of the e-zines they receive, according to the Nielsen Norman Group’s latest eyetracking study.… Read the full article
Every day, your readers get way too much to read. In fact, according to a study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, your readers are bombarded with the data equivalent of 174 newspapers — ads included — every single day.… Read the full article
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen recommends condensing copy by 50% online.
That’s certainly a useful guideline. But no single, overarching rule makes sense all the time.… Read the full article
Here’s the title of one of usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s earliest web-writing articles:1
The first paragraph:
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.… Read the full article
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.… Read the full article
Think of subheads as the icing on the cake.
Skimmers look at subheads to learn what content you’re offering on a webpage, blog post or news release.… Read the full article
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.… Read the full article
Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs.… Read the full article
