Oct 8, 2014

Being An Effective Online Writer

Always wanted to be able to write a readable piece online? Or even one on paper? Here's how to keep your audience reading...

Chrissie Butler is a self professed story teller which leads to sharing her stories an interesting experience for her audience. As an audience member it is easy to listen to her in person but to turn these stories into readable pieces is another story (excuse the pun). 

Due to readers taking 3 seconds to scan a piece of text before deciding if they are to read it or not, as a result you don't have long to capture your perspective audiences attention. It has been researched and proven that majority of readers use a 'F' style of skimming and scanning, this 'F' style (which may sound interesting) is just a process where the audience read the titles, headings and picture before they commit to reading the whole article or story

With this in mind, what is important to remember with writing (which can be said in many different aspects of learning and life) is we all come to conclusions differently, so therefore how I do things is not the default for how everyone does things or processes things. With this in mind when comparing two pieces of work which are the same, what do you like about either text? What would you be more likely to read? These questions are important for students to answer when they are thinking about 'publishing' their works.

With these new thinkings in mind, I will be helping my students to:

- Use a direct headline or title, it doesn't have to be clever or funny. It does have to be on track and on task so that people get a clear picture about what is to come in the story (no false advertising here).

- Topic or summary sentence, are important, they set the pitch of the writing and give the readers more information these should be one line and to the point.

- Image labels (or cations for the pictures) for those who can't see the pictures or don't relate pictures to text this will give them more in depth knowledge of the writing.

- Heading levels use heading levels when formatting your titles and sub headings.

- Hyperlinks should have what you are going to read in the links title or should give the reading some idea about where this link is going to take you.

Where can I find out more information?:

passonable.wordpress.com - Chrissie Butlers blog

1 comment: