Writing for Somebody in a Hurry

How people actually read a page

Not in order. They scan headings, catch the first few words of paragraphs, notice anything bold, and stop where something matches what they came for.

Only then do they read properly, and only that one section rather than the whole page.

Which means a page is not one piece of writing. It is a set of entry points, and each one has to work for somebody who arrived at it directly.

Who the reader usually is

Worth picturing accurately, because it changes the writing.

Standing up. Holding a phone in one hand. Somewhere with a distraction. Possibly mildly annoyed, because they have a problem and are looking for somebody to fix it.

Not seated at a desk with a coffee, working through your page in order.

Every formatting decision follows from that picture. Short paragraphs because a wall of text on a phone is intimidating. Headings because scanning is how they navigate. Plain words because processing effort is at a premium.

None of that is about intelligence. A professor standing in the rain reads the same way anybody else does.

Front-loading

The single most useful habit.

Put the answer in the first sentence, then explain. Not context, then reasoning, then conclusion.

Compare: "There are many factors that influence how quickly we can attend, including workload, location and the nature of the problem." Against: "Usually within two working days, sooner for emergencies."

The second answers the question. The first is a preamble to answering it, and a scanning reader leaves before reaching the answer.

This applies at every level: first sentence of the page, first sentence of each section, first words of each bullet.

A worked example

A locksmith's page about emergency callouts, written as three paragraphs of context about the importance of security.

Somebody locked out of their house, standing on a doorstep in the rain, reads none of that. They want the number, the price and how long.

The rewrite put those three things in the first screen, in that order, in large text. Everything else moved below.

Calls from that page rose substantially, and the owner noticed a second effect: fewer people phoning to ask the price before deciding, because it was already answered.

The page got shorter at the top and stayed the same length overall. Nothing was deleted; the order changed.

Paragraph length

Two or three sentences, most of the time.

That is shorter than feels natural to write and it is how the page will be experienced on a narrow screen, where four sentences becomes a solid block.

Long paragraphs are not harder to understand. They are harder to enter, which matters when the reader is scanning for a place to start.

The occasional one-sentence paragraph is a useful tool. It gets read, because it stands out from everything around it.

Headings that say something

The scanning reader's navigation, and usually wasted.

"Our Approach" tells the scanner nothing. "We visit before quoting" tells them what the section says and lets them decide whether to read it.

A page whose headings can be read alone and still make sense is a page that works for somebody in a hurry.

That is also a good test. Read only your headings. If the result is a list of vague nouns, the page has no structure a scanner can use.

The counter-case

Where this style is wrong.

Anything that must be read completely and precisely: terms, a safety notice, a legal statement. Breaking those into scannable fragments encourages partial reading, which is the opposite of what they need.

Longer-form writing where the reader has committed, such as a detailed guide somebody chose to open. There, sustained paragraphs are appropriate and chopping them is patronising.

And anything where the sequence genuinely matters, such as instructions, where front-loading the conclusion would be actively confusing.

The test is whether the reader arrived by accident and can leave freely. If so, write for scanning. If they are committed, write properly.

Words that cost effort

Not a vocabulary rule, a processing one.

Prefer the shorter word where it means the same thing. Use, not utilise. Buy, not purchase. Start, not commence.

Prefer the active construction, because it is shorter and clearer about who does what. We will call you, not you will be contacted.

And name the thing rather than referring to it. This, it and that force the reader back up the page to work out what is meant.

Formatting that helps

1. Bold the phrase that matters, not a whole sentence.
2. Use lists where there genuinely is a list.
3. Keep line length moderate, which the layout controls.
4. Put contact details where a scanner will hit them, not only the footer.
5. Leave white space, which makes a page approachable.

The first is frequently overdone. A page with half its text bold has no emphasis at all, which is worse than none, because the reader stops trusting it.

The first sentence problem

Where most pages lose people, and it is a habit rather than a skill gap.

Writers warm up. The first sentence is throat-clearing, the second sets context, and the third finally says something. That is how writing works when you are producing it.

It is not how it should be read. The fix is mechanical: write the page, then delete the first sentence, and check whether anything was lost.

Nine times out of ten nothing was, and the page now opens with something worth reading.

Doing this once per page, as a final pass, improves more pages than any other single edit available, and it takes about ten seconds.

Testing it

Two checks that take a minute each.

Read the page on your own phone, standing up, and notice where you lose interest. That point is where a customer left.

Then read only the headings and the first line of each paragraph, which is roughly what a scanner sees. If the page still communicates, it works.

Neither test requires anybody else, and both find problems that reading on a desktop while proud of your own writing will not.

How much there should be to scan in the first place is covered in how much text is too much.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.