What writers and others say
“Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle. That’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“We have cast our lot with the juggler.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
The web “turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
The web is “training our brains to pay attention to crap.”
— Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
Online multitasking makes us “suckers for irrelevancy.”
— Clifford Nash, a Sanford University professor who’s studied the effects of multitasking
“I don’t know how to read any more. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.”
— Gary Shteyngart, author, Super Sad True Love Story
How long should your message be?
Readability helps everyone — those with high literacy rates as well as low, according to new research by the Nielsen Norman Group.
When you make your writing easier to read, your audience members will read it faster, understand it better and enjoy it more.Want to master a seven-step system for making every piece you write easier to read and understand. If so, bring Ann in to present Catch Your Readers — a persuasive-writing course — to your team.
They’ll learn how long their paragraphs, sentences and words should be. And they’ll leave with a free tool they can use to measure, monitor and manage readability.