Benchmark readability against The Huffington Post
How does your message stand up against The Huffington Post?
After all, The Huffington Post is the third most popular online news site, after only Yahoo!… Read the full article
Story length
Skimm this!
Make your e-zine interesting, relevant, easy
What’s the secret to a successful e-zine? Make ’em laugh; make ’em think; make ’em Skimm.
In other words, make it interesting, relevant and easy.… Read the full article
‘Nearly all of them are far too long’
Churchill calls for shorter communications
Do your executives add words to every communication they review? Not so Winston Churchill. He called for shorter pieces to save staff time and energy.… Read the full article
Short web pages
4 ways to optimize long stories for phone reading
How long is too long for the mobile screen?
“Only the biggest/most complex stories should go above 600 words,” counsels the BBC in its guide to writing news for the mobile screen.… Read the full article
Turn Strunk & White upside down
Three new ways to approach classic writing wisdom
After 50 years on writers’ bookshelves, The Elements of Style — aka “Strunk and White” — still offers perhaps the best collection of techniques for compressing copy:
- Use the active voice.
The release is dead
Long live the release
Twitter has never issued a news release. Amazon introduced the Kindle through a series of tweets. Google announced Alphabet via a blog post from Larry Page.… Read the full article
Three ways to streamline sentences
Cut a word, increase comprehension
Here’s the problem with long sentences: Every time you add a word, you reduce comprehension.
Let your sentences sprawl, and the subject, verb and object get too far away from each other.… Read the full article
I’ve got a little list
Eight thoughts about the length of your listicle
Thank you, David Letterman.
The Top 10 list rules the web — or at least, Buzzfeed. The number of Buzzfeed listicles with the numeral 10 in the headline outranked the next most popular numeral (15) by 142%, according to research by Noah Veltman and Brian Abelson, two Knight-Mozilla fellows.… Read the full article
What closet tidying taught me about editing
Audition your words to go in, not out
When Lynn Wylie, aka Best Sister Ever, sent me an Unfancy blog post arguing that all you need to look great every day is a capsule wardrobe of 37 items per season, I scoffed.… Read the full article
Create more short pages
Fewer long pages are less effective
Think index cards, not toilet paper: websites with many short pages — as opposed to those with fewer longer pages — work better.… Read the full article