Inviting Readers To Read

When was the last time you looked at a page you’ve written? I mean really looked at it, as if you hadn’t written it?

Try this little experiment:

• Pick a page you’ve written recently. Any page. For any audience.
• Hang it on a bulletin board, a wall, even the front of your computer monitor.
• Step back to at least arm’s length — a smidge further if you’re blessed with good distance vision. You should be able to see the page but not read it.

What do you see? What kind of balance is there between text and empty space? Between text and pictures? Between black and color? Is there so much text on your page that when you look at it from this perspective it seems to spooge together into one big grey mass? 

Now ask yourself: Would you want to step forward, take this page in hand, and read it? Do you think your intended readers would?

If your answer to the first question is “No,” I can guarantee that your answer to the second question is “No” as well.

When I was in journalism school, the students in the magazine program first learned about “invitations to read” (one professor called them ”opportunities to read”). It was a marriage of writing and design — a concerted effort to present information in a visually appealing package. Every element on a page was an invitation to enter the article and begin reading it. To name just a few elements:

• Headlines
• Subheads
• Photographs (and their captions)
• Illustrations (and their titles or captions)
• Tables, charts and graphs (and their titles or captions)
• Icons
• Pull quotes
• Lists
• Sidebars
• Color
• Borders
• White space

In workshops at school, and later as an editor at a personal computing magazine, I looked for opportunities to create invitations for my readers. It was a habit that I brought to my work in technical writing and in corporate communications writing. In technical documentation in particular, just because the information was often exceedingly technical didn’t mean that it had to be painful to read. If it couldn’t be made entertaining, it could at least be made easy to get into, get through, and get out of. 

Think about it. When you’re flipping through a magazine or newspaper, what makes you stop to look at a page for more than three seconds? What caught your eye first? What caught your eye second and convinced you to read a little further? Is there an element from my list above that’s a sure-fire way to get you every time?

Think about it for a bit. Did something surprise you? Did you take yourself for a headline junkie, only to realize that photos have an equally strong — or stronger — pull for you? Share your discovery here with us, there’s much we can learn from each other’s experiences and preferences. Then join us here when we pick up again on Wednesday!