Open Up More White Space in Your Writing
Think of it as breathing room
Writing and reading online is not the same as writing and reading in print, or longform things like novels and non-fiction books, even if read on readers like Kindle.
If you want to keep readers moving through your article, you need to think about how readers consume your writing. In a newsletter like this leaving some breathing room helps the reader skim through, consuming a sentence or two at a time.
I know, you don’t want your readers to take breaks. They should find your writing so immersive that they can’t put it down.
When I say ‘take breaks’ in this context, I’m not talking about losing the reader and hoping they pick up where they left off.
The idea is to leave some white space between thoughts. Think of it as a brief processing step.
One of the top writers on productivity on Medium, Sinem Gunel, applies this to the way she organizes her work from day to day. Her concept of white space, applies to separating tasks by type, with some breathing space in between.
In her case it is a form of time management. One day for writing, one for operations, one for promotion, etc. That’s what works for her because she is doing a lot of different tasks, writing, offering courses, coaching, etc.
She manages this work as a full time business.
I see the concept of white space differently. Mine is as simple as leaving a space between sentences or ideas on the page, like I’m doing here.
By the way, if you read her stuff, Sinem is a practitioner of this concept. Every sentence is its own paragraph. There is a very good reason for this.
When I was doing content marketing we regularly used a tool called eye tracking to see what content on a page was attracting eyeballs and for how long. It was very useful for designing a website to be easily digested.
Eye tracking uses a heat map to graphically show where visitors focus by creating an image of the screen and highlighting areas where people’s eye movements rest and for how long. Tracking it required special monitors that could track eye movements.
But services like Google analytics began measuring this and providing users with the information so we could optimize placement.
It told us what priority readers followed when reading text. The order at the time was headlines, subheads, picture captions, and lastly, blocks of text. It was a marketing tool.
But any online writer can learn from it. We may not want to hear it, but that beautifully crafted paragraph with a dozen elegant sentences is the least popular thing on the page these days.
Readers shunned dense blocks of text. They just skimmed past them.
We can cry about declining attention spans and an online culture that is shallow and lazy.
That might be true, but it doesn’t matter a bit and here’s why:
When you write online the primary goal is to structure and tell a story that keeps the reader engaged from beginning to end.
It does not mean it has to be short or dumbed down. To the contrary, if you structure things with white space and short sentences, you can build a better understanding of complex ideas by stacking simplicity until an idea makes sense to the reader.
This is how we learn.
It’s also how a story is built and delivered.
The best example I can give is in filmmaking. Making a film is not about words, it is about action, because the visual component is so front and center, followed by music, editing, and finally, dialog.
The reality is that this is how people learn to consume content when we are developing. We consume scenes that when taken together form acts. That’s why most scriptwriting coaches will teach the classic three act formula nearly every film follows.
It’s entirely about pacing.
And so is writing information- like this article.
If you want to write dense blocks of text, go ahead, but understand that many potential readers will take a look and subconsciously move on. If you think those are not the readers you want, be that way.
But for an article like this, snappy sentences, and white space tell the reader they can blast through, learn something, and move on.
Btw, this is why so many writers with advanced degrees, especially in English, literature, and philosophy, are almost unreadable. Academia encourages a writing style designed for old school academics.
You know, that scholar in a garret pouring over a huge book surrounded by piles of dusty books.
They may still exist, but there aren’t many of them.
Blow the dust out, add white space, cut extraneous words, and write in the active voice.
You will see read time increase whether you are doing science writing, advice, or telling a complex story.
It’s just the way it is.