At Anthrobytes Media, you might think we’re the last people to think short is good. Sharon is just over 6 feet (1.84 m) tall and Andy is 6’7″ (2.0 m). Short isn’t something we really are.
And yet, short is good when it comes to content. So what do I mean? This article includes some strategies for Clear Writing in technical writing content that can help you. Clear Writing is based on Plain English, and can help you be clear and short in your writing.
Short is easier to understand
Overall, you want short content, even when you write for SEO.
Short sentences
Sentences should be less than 25 words. Research shows over 25 exceeds the cognitive carrying capacity of working memory and remembering the content falls significantly. The sweet spot seems to be 20 words.
Related to short sentences is the words that make up a sentence. Overall, write to a 5th grade level, even if you expect your audience to be domain experts. The average reading level in the US is about 5th grade–not because Americans are foolish or uneducated. America has a large non-native English speaker population, and this impacts the overall reading levels. Clear Writing keeps the sentences under 20 words and writes at the 5th grade level.
Additionally, your audience probably includes many non-native speakers. Reading in a second language while trying to follow a procedure in a complex or new tool is a lot of cognitive load. You can reduce that load by using simpler, shorter words and using the same word for the same thing. Plain English research has shown this is most effective to help people remember and act on your words.
Just doing this step makes your writing easier to read, remember, and act upon. You’ve reduced the noise in the signal because you’re cutting all the extra words. Clear Writing keeps the sentences under 20 words and writes at the 5th grade level.
Short paragraphs
Related to short sentences are short paragraphs. The sweet spot here seems to be 3 to 5 sentences in a paragraph. Anne Janzer writes:
Paragraph length affects the reader’s rhythm. Short paragraphs offer the reader a chance to process what they’ve been reading. Breaking up long blocks of text may be the fastest way to lighten the tone of your writing.
Janzer, Anne. Writing to Be Understood: What Works and Why (p. 154). Cuesta Park Consulting. Kindle Edition.
Allow your reader to absorb and process what you’re reading so they really get the message. If the reader gets the message, they can act on the message. In Clear Writing, each paragraph should only have 1 message, or topic. When you change the message, you start a new paragraph.
So how should your paragraph be structured? Try this structure:
The topic sentence goes here and is what the paragraph is about. Now a sentence amplifying the information from the topic sentence. Another sentence adds a little more information to the point of the paragraph. If you need it, another sentence that adds a little more detail about this topic. End the paragraph with an example or metaphor or limitation to the topic of the paragraph.
That’s the Clear Writing structure.
Short sections
So now that we have our short sentences and short paragraphs, we need to label them with headings. Headings are the red text in this article. You want a heading about every 3 to 5 paragraphs.
How does this help? It supports the F scanning method people use to find the information they’re looking for. The F scanning method was identified in 2006 and seems to be the same today.
People reading in an upper left to bottom right language tend to scan the page from the upper-left corner across and then down the left side of the page. One of the things they are looking for is usually a heading. At the heading, they stop and read it. If that’s generally what they’re looking for, they continue to the topic sentence in the first paragraph.
Then it’s a pretty simple if-then-else loop: If this is the information they are looking for, they continue to read, else, they go back to the F scan.
If this is how people search for information, then let’s support them in that effort. Let’s put a heading every 3 to 5 paragraphs. Let’s make it easy for our readers to find the information they’re looking for.
In short
If you want your reader to find what they’re looking for, understand what they found, and take action on it, short is the way. If you use these Plain English techniques, you improve the content you’re writing and help your reader understand you.
And that’s the goal we all have: to be understood.
If you want help in being trained in Clear Writing, review this general syllabus and then reach out to us.
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