Your eyes read in an F
In 2006, Jakob Nielsen, often called the guru of usability, had hundreds of people read websites while a camera tracked where their eyes went. The heatmaps looked almost the same every time: two horizontal stripes at the top, then a vertical stripe down the left edge. The letter F. People read the first line, part of the second, and then just slide down the start of each paragraph, checking for anything that's about them. In 2017 the research was repeated on new websites and phones. The F was still there.
The same lab produced a number everyone who writes should tape above their desk. On an average page visit, people have time to read at most 28% of the words, realistically around 20%. And every extra hundred words adds only about 4.4 seconds to their visit.
A fifth. Of the text you spent all afternoon on, your reader reads a fifth. And they pick which fifth.
The brain as a hunter
Why do we do this? In the late 1990s, Xerox PARC researchers Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card came up with a theory that sounds like a nature documentary: people look for information the way animals look for food. It's called information foraging theory. A hunter doesn't wander the woods at random. It follows a trail, a scent. When the scent is strong, it keeps going. When it fades, it tries somewhere else, because it doesn't pay to spend time where there's nothing to find.
Readers do the same. A headline, a first sentence, a bold word or a subhead is "information scent." It promises there's something further down. If the reader can smell that promise, they read. If not, they leave. And they don't have to close the tab to do it. Their eyes just slide down and look elsewhere.
Remember the doorman from part one? He decided whether your ad got noticed at all. Here's his colleague. He's let your text in, but he decides how much of it gets read. And he's on the same payroll: the brain burns about 20% of the body's energy, so it doesn't read anything just for fun.
I share, therefore I am
Now the best part. In 2016, researchers from Columbia University and France's Inria institute spent a month tracking how articles from major news sites were shared on Twitter. 2.8 million shares in total. The result: 59% of the links people shared were never opened by anyone.
So people share articles they haven't read. Absurd at first glance. Pretty logical at second. Sharing usually isn't a recommendation to read. It's a message about me: this is what I think, this is what I care about, this is the kind of person I am. A headline is enough for that.
Which leaves you with one inconvenient fact. For most people, your headline is your whole article. It's what they understand, remember and pass on. Write your headline like a folder label on a desktop and you've lost before you started. #justsaying
The goldfish that never existed
You may have heard that people now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Eight seconds versus its nine. It gets quoted at conferences almost as often as the 10,000-ads-a-day legend from part one.
It comes from a 2015 report Microsoft Canada put out for marketers. But the number wasn't from Microsoft's own research. It was a chart borrowed from a website called Statistic Brain. When BBC reporter Simon Maybin tried to trace it in 2017, the sources the site cited had never measured anything of the kind. And nobody ever measured a goldfish's attention span at all. Lab experiments actually show goldfish remember what they've learned for far longer than a few seconds.
The real numbers are more interesting. Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine measured that people stay on one thing on a screen for 47 seconds on average. Yet the same person will binge three episodes of a show in the evening and listen to a two-hour podcast on the way to work. Attention isn't disappearing. People just don't hand it out for free. You have to show you're worth it first.
To me, this is the most important sentence of the whole series: the problem isn't how long your text is. The problem is that nobody sold it to the reader at the start.
What to do: three doormen in every piece of copy
When people scan, they don't read your text top to bottom. They only read its skeleton. And it has three parts:
- The headline. For 59% of people, it's the whole article. It has to carry the main point, not just hint at the topic.
- The first sentence. It decides whether the reader stays. No "In today's fast-paced world…". A story, a number or a twist.
- Subheads and bold words. That's the vertical stroke of the F. Someone who reads only those should understand what the article is about. Someone who wants more will find it in the text.
How to write a headline, first sentence and subheads that get past the doorman is part three, on Thursday. With concrete before-and-after examples.
For a small beauty salon: nobody reads an Instagram caption in full. People read the first line before "…more." If it says "Hello, dear clients, we'd like to inform you…", nobody sees the rest. If it says "Tuesday evenings just opened up for November. First three to book get them," you've got a shot. Same with texts: people read the preview, not the message.
For a corporation in Miami: annual reports, newsletters, board decks. Everything gets scanned. If a slide's title states a topic ("Texas Revenue Q3") instead of a conclusion ("Texas revenue fell 8% because…"), most of the table will read it like a riddle.
Expert perspective: "For twenty years I've been writing for people who don't have time. I've learned one thing: nobody reads what you write. People read what you promise them. The headline is the promise, the first sentence is the down payment, and the rest of the text is the installments. Miss the down payment and nobody collects the installments," says Michal Krčmář, founder of Don Marketer and a CMO with nearly two decades of experience in global marketing.
The takeaway
Next time you write anything, a post, an email, a deck, read only the headline, the first sentence and the subheads first. Nothing else. If they tell you what it's about and make you want to keep reading, you're done. If not, you don't have copy. You have a private diary.
And now, the promised sentence. Here it is: if you're reading this, you're part of the minority that makes long-form writing worth it. Most people never got here. You did. And it's people like you that make it worth writing the whole article, not just the headline. And to my friend from the intro: if you're reading this, you are hereby officially pardoned.
Thursday brings the third and final part: how to write a headline and a first sentence that get almost anyone past the doorman. Concrete, with examples, even for a hair salon.
And if you want to know how much to put into brand so people remember you, and how much into performance so they find you, the Don Marketer calculator will work it out in 2 minutes.
Sources: Nielsen Norman Group: How Little Do Users Read? (Jakob Nielsen, 2008, 2005 data); Nielsen Norman Group: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (2006, updated 2017); Fortune: 6 out of 10 people share links without clicking them (Gabielkov et al., Columbia University and Inria, 2016, 2.8M shares); P. Pirolli, S. Card: Information Foraging (Psychological Review, 1999); ScienceBlog: Humans don't have an 8-second attention span (Microsoft Canada 2015, BBC 2017); University of California: Can't pay attention? You're not alone (Gloria Mark, 2023); the author's own experience.
