Bob (not your uncle) needs your help

How clean-cut content improves comprehension

Picture Bob, one of your awesome front-line employees. He scans your knowledge articles while trying to help a customer, Mrs Mangels. It’s noisy; the lights are so bright. He swivels between systems…

His tummy growls because he should have gone to lunch 10 minutes ago. Mrs M is grumpy because she’s been waiting ‘for evah’. His Team Leader pings him asking why he hasn’t done that mandatory training course. He finds the right page but there’s so much info to absorb. Hard to scan. Confusing layout. Distracting words. ‘Why can’t they just get to the point!’ Now Bob has a headache. Poor Bob.

Many studies report that reading digital text takes more brain power than perusing physical print and people find it a tad harder to remember the content. Plus, they’re usually not as focused as they would be if curled up in a cosy chair with a Harry Potter novel, a steaming mug of cocoa and a block of Old Gold sneakily tucked under a cushion.

They also don’t tend to read word by word but continually skip forward. And sometimes jump back if they didn’t grasp the meaning or get waylaid by odd words or cluttered punctuation.

In the book ‘Write to the Point’ the author states, ‘We live in an age that favours light punctuation.’

Sam Leith

This perhaps rattles some of you because ‘it weren’t like that in my day, chuck’, and you really, really want to keep adding full stops at the end of your dot points, don’t you (please don’t).

In the online environment people’s gaze bounces from menus, to links, to scrollbars and whatever else is visually thrown at them (ermahgerd, berbles!). Have a look at this Wikipedia entry on Eye movement in reading if you so wish.

Combine Bob’s working environment with something called ‘continuous partial attention’, coined by technology consultant Linda Stone.

She explains it as ‘an always on, anywhere, anytime behaviour that creates an artificial sense of crisis. We are always on high alert, demanding multiple cognitively complex actions from ourselves. We are reaching to keep a top priority in focus, while scanning the periphery to see if we are missing other opportunities. Who’s ringing? How many emails? What’s on my to-do list? What time is it in Bangalore?’.

You experience this yourself all the time; talking on the phone and driving (hands-free of course), drafting an email while on a Zoom meeting (Bob! You’re on mute!), listening to mum while texting your BFF on your iPhone under the table (yes, mum…).

So next time you’re writing a knowledge article, put yourself in Bob’s shoes (size 10). Strip that content down and pepper it with lovely lists. Throw out some of that loitering, up-to-no-good punctuation. Help Bob. Bob will thank you.

Tips:

• Strive for simplicity of thought and simplicity of punctuation will follow – a Style Guide is your friend
• No punctuation at the end of list points* (one sentence per point), titles or headings
• Single quote marks, not double
• Avoid Trademark symbols in internal content
• Be frugal with exclamation marks (one is sufficient)

* Various schools of thought on this but whatever you decide, be consistent – I prefer clean, simple formatting so that my publishers don’t need to ‘think’.