Magnetic Content and The Ways We Read Text
Posted on June 26, 2007
Filed Under Content, Surveys
Where does your eye land when reading a text be it in print or online? Is it the headline that attracts you, the colour, the main story itself or some teaser. If the newspapers and the web sites want to have a promising future they have to find the answer to that question otherwise they won’t have readers at all.
Poynter Institute comes with a study that reveals some intriguing facts which will help writers to attract more readers.
This school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists aims at defining the different types of behaviour when reading different kinds of story text. The study is focused on examining the print readership and the online one. It also compares the broad sheet reading attraction to the tabloid one.
People read text from both online and print sources
The major findings are with regards to the amount of text that is read online and in print. The most significant finding says that a larger percent of story text is read online than in print. The institute also reveals that once a story was selected online some 77% from the story were read which is more than the percentage of the read text in print by far.
The way we read
According to the Institute there are two styles of reading a text regardless of its source,whether it is an online text or in print. The two styles when reading a text are:
- methodical - readers using that style read from the top to the bottom, it is quite possible for them to re-read the text because they don’t scan it at all before they start reading. Online these readers use drop down menus and navigation bars to surf through the text.
- scanning - these readers scan different elements like headlines, photos and other elements being displayed. They read a part of the story and then focus on a photo or another element and they never go back to the same element. Online these readers are looking for a specific element that attracts their attention and just then they click on the story to read it.
It is more than clear from the survey that some 75 percent of print readers use the methodical style. This doesn’t apply for the online readers, though. Half of them are methodical, while the other half are scanners. Regardless of the way they read both methodical readers and scanning readers read about the same percentage of story text.
Yet another interesting fact that is worth mentioning is that in print, methodical readers read a larger percent of text than the scanning readers.
Non-traditional story texts
Several sources, both online and in print, containing identical information fact for fact but a different story layout had been displayed to a number of people. The best answers to the asked questions were given by people who have read the story with the most alternative narrative.
Large photos and headlines
This testifies that people’s attention is attracted by elements and story structure that is not traditional. Which brings us to the next thing disclosed by Poynter Institute. They displayed 20 large photos and 100 small photos to a group of people. Surprisingly the large photos, which are less in number than the small ones, attracted more eye stops. Eye stop is considered every time when the eye of the reader stops and focuses on a specific spot from the text or the photo. Generally speaking it turns out that large headlines and photos get a lot of attention but the story is completely different for the online readership. The navigation bars, teasers and the lists are the eye stops that attract readers online.
Photos get a lot of attention in print
Documentary photos displayng action in real time are more likely to get attention than photos made in a studio with no motion captured. A for the colouring we can say that the colourful photos get more attention than the black and white and this was mainly observed in broadsheet.
All these facts are just a small parcel from the vast surface that this study covers but let’s hope that you will get a new perspective on the way that you have to write for you readers so that you make the text interesting and eye catching for them.
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