Content writing “fast-food” way

How many of you would actually read article running into 2-3 pages? Let 2-3 pages alone, you would rarely read a post having more than 5-6 paragraphs. For us who loves McDonald burgers and KFC chiken buckets, one full page article is like ”oh my god I can’t read it” and we drop-out from the website. So for these readers, we’ve to write “fast-food” way.

So what’s this “fast-food” way?
Use catchy word or puch line to grab readers attention. Something like – you surely don’t want to read any more, do you? or using familiar personality names would help.

Use bullet points and create list post. List post is not a post in itself. It’s a collection of links to different posts. Reader may pick any one of them and move on. But there’s a catch. Post isn’t a persistent, so if you want them to read 2 of your post, that would not happen

Keep paragraphs short and simple. You can use micro level description of 40-60 words to catch the reader’s eye

It’s  a good practice to write a summary at the top

In short,

• Highlight words
• Use bullets or lists
• Present different thought in every paragrapgh. Or as Use it says, one idea per paragraph
• Write an executive summary at the top.

So, whatever you read before this, was an example of “fast-food” post. Now, to elaborate more why “fast-food” way?

According to useit, 79% of test readers tend to scan any new page that they came across rather than reading word-by-word. These readers usually looked for anchors like bold, highlighted text or use of some catchy image or using quotation marks. Also, they read 1st line of the paragraph and try to understand what could be in the rest of the paragraph. Some of them also read last line of the paragraph in addition. So from this you can clearly see that, always try to present important information in 1st line and the last line

May be you can adopt to inverted pyramid style of writing. In this style, we usually present crux of the post right at the start. It’s good for readers as well as writers. This way we make users to read what we want and also allow them to skip and jump to another post.