From the course: Learning to Write for the Web

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Readers lose interest quickly

Readers lose interest quickly

From the course: Learning to Write for the Web

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Readers lose interest quickly

- Reading a novel wouldn't always be much fun if the author gave away the ending in the first paragraph. However, online that's exactly what you want to do. This way your readers will know they found the article that they need, and continue on to get the details, or they'll realize quickly that they're in the wrong place and thank you for not wasting their time. Online readers lose interest with a piece of text very quickly. If you look at a heat map of the amount gaze time people spend on different parts of an article you'll notice that the further down the page you get the less they're paying attention, so it makes sense to give a summary of the important information at the very beginning, and then expand on the information piece by piece through the rest of the article. Journalists are very familiar with this style of writing. When they write a news story for a print publication it's not always clear how much space there'll be for the final article. For that reason journalists…

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