People Do Read

A lot of people, even respectable experts in their fields, are still throwing around the phrase “people don’t read.” They cite all kinds of valid data to back them up. Well, I’m here to tell you that people do read, they just read differently.

The infographic is sometimes seen as evidence that we’re not reading anymore—we crave visual stimuli and images that transmit information far better than words. As you’ll note from the discussion between a couple of Media Genesis’ designers, that’s not the whole story.

Not all web behavior is reading behavior (maybe they’re just not that into you)

The problem is that a lot of people confuse web behavior with reading behavior overall. They think that if your site has a high bounce rate and people aren’t scrolling, it’s because they don’t read. Throw some images up there! Embed a video! Make a game! While those are all fine suggestions for engagement, the simple fact is that people are reading, but maybe they’re not reading your content, or maybe they’re just not reading it all at once.

When confronted with such volume of information, we’ve learned to filter rapidly. We take our content in bites. We scan and evaluate. We quickly decide if it’s worth our time. We set aside substantial content that makes the cut for a later time when we’re ready to invest. Likely, we don’t finish most of what we start, but we do read. David Boozer amassed many interesting statistics about digital content and user behavior, including the facts that 329 million people read blogs monthly and sources with full-text content are 2.3 times more likely to have return visitors.

Okay, not all people read, but that’s nothing new

According to an article on Slate that also declares that people don’t read, we’re even making the decision to share content before we read all of it! All that sharing may be bringing a huge audience of non-readers to the site, and they’ll read the headline and move along. This sounds like support for the “people don’t read” group, but honestly, the news has always been structured like that. Journalists, long before the advent of the internet, were taught to put the most important information at the beginning and write in a way that assumes the reader won’t finish. Those who do finish will be rewarded with ample details, but they need to make the decision to keep going. It’s the same situation as we see online, only now it’s amplified by a world of near infinite choice and the ability to track engagement.

Set news aside (a lot of people focus on the news when we talk about how people read), and consider how much time we spend on social media, blogs, and with our ebooks. We’re reading constantly, even if we’re not finishing. The question remains, is this new? Mark Twain thought about these same habits when he set out to define some of our more rigorous literature: “Classic: a book which people praise and don’t read.” From the dawn of literate time, those who read (or like people to think they do), tend to take offense at the reading choices or lack thereof of those around them. Maybe we don’t read as much as we think we should, but it doesn’t appear that we ever have.

How to make your content readable

As a content creator, I tend to advocate for long-form content. These days, long-form content seems to mean anything that has more than 300 words, but it should also be thoughtful content and structured in a way that makes it easy to ingest piecemeal. It’s been proven that adding images encourages greater engagement with text. Making paragraphs narrow and short helps people read more quickly and lessens the perceived energy that they invest. Finally, make your content scanable. Use semantic markup to add bold headers that entice the reader. Give your audience the power to quickly evaluate what you have to offer, and if you’ve written a interesting piece of content, they’ll read… most of it.

People read in pieces and on diverse platforms, so another way to get them to read your content is to have it broken up into palatable chunks on platforms designed for short-form content (social media). Diversify and have a highly skilled editor to make the right decisions about the meat of your content. It’s still vital to have a home for long-form content for those who are ready to invest—and those who come to your site prepared to read based on what they saw on Twitter will benefit your site by giving it a boost in search engine rank (the time we spend on websites and how much we scroll contributes to how the sites are perceived by search engines like Google).

Design your site to make reading and sharing easy for your visitors, and stop saying people don’t read. Start talking about how they read, because that is the key to getting your message across.