Brevity is the Soul of Wit

My wife and co-blogger here at GTS Tool Box recently sent me a link to a post that claimed the average time a person spends on a blog is 96 seconds. For some businesses or campaigns, that's all they need to get their message out. For others, you better hope that what the reader scans is all the pertinent information they need to make an informed decision.

Interestingly, even though the average read time on a blog is 96 seconds…

* …that drops to 37 seconds for the largest internet blogs.

* …79% of readers scan pages rather than read them

* …16% read the whole page.

Now, if you've gotten this far and have read our previous posts, you'll may think that brevity is not one of our stronger suits. The thing is, if you were interested it what we previously wrote about, you probably read the whole thing. If not, you may have scanned them and left. But to maximize your readers time, keep things short. How do you do that?

1. Keep your topics simple - Even if it's a complicated topic remember this simple rule: "Keep it simple stupid." In today's day and age, attention spans are short. If you start complicating matters, your readers will tune out. According to the Informatics Review research tells us that to communicate effectively with a general audience in the U.S., we need to write at a 6th-8th grade reading level. Just be sure not to talk down to your readers.
   
2. Make your pitch in the first paragraph - Remember back in high school writing the purpose statement had to be in the first paragraph? Yeah, that rule still applies even in blogging.
   
3. Break up your posts - If you have a great topic on which to write, but could be lengthy, break if up into a series of posts. If your readers enjoy the topic, chances are they will come back to read "the rest of the story".

Remember, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "brevity is the soul of wit."