Catching the attention of readers

We talk frequently about interesting readers in our stories. We are competing for their attention against other writing, sports, family, friends, TV... you get the idea.

Readers will ignore your work if it is not exciting, intriguing, engaging with lively text, graphics, art, audio enhancements and other bells and whistles.

In an interesting article for the Washington Post, Thomas Washington (that's his name; this is not a typo) who is a librarian for a school in McLean, Va. writes that the days when people would work through dense prose and difficult concepts for the sake of learning something important are over.

There are just so many books and other publications available easily now that students have adapted to "information overload" by getting very good at scanning, then tossing out the stuff they don't want to read.

"We've grown into a culture of searchers, not readers," he writes. They extract the main ideas from chunks of text, they move on to the next thing quickly.

This is different from not liking to read.

Readers, he said, are asking themselves: "What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given that by the end of our lives we will have absorbed and converted to knowledge only a sliver of the information available, should be bother knowing it?"

So, think about this the next time you are tempted to write a lot of verbiage that doesn't get quickly to the point with clear, simple words and doesn't makes it clear to readers quickly exactly why they should keep on reading.