3.06 How to structure your article to enhance scannability?

What is scanning?

When reading a fantasy book, you will probably start at the top left corner on the first page and make your way through page-by-page, in the same order as the author intended to tell his or her story. All tiny details you come across along the way are vital to understanding the plot, as well as the relationships between characters and events.

When reading a new article or a background story, however, people tend to be a lot less patient. When looking for an answer, people want to find it as quickly as possible. That’s why they rarely start by reading the full article, but they scan the text, looking for the most important clues. This way, you can quickly deduce whether this article will be of any help in finding the answer to your question.

People tend to scan pages in a way that resembles the shape of the letter ‘F’, meaning they’ll first read the introduction and then go on to scan the sub-headings (corresponding to the lower ‘branch’ of the letter F). So, make sure your article is structured in a similar way.

5 W’s and one H

When writing news articles, these questions can of of great help when you want to make your article ‘scannable’:

• Who?
• What?
• Where?
• When?
• Why?
• How?

Of course, it really depends on the content of the article whether all of these questions are relevant, but is is a good guideline to get you going.

Tips

Let’s end with a few practical tips:

• Pay attention to your article’s title. It is the first thing that people will read and strongly decides whether they want to read the full article. Try to make your title short and concise, place important words at the beginning and use numericals for numbers (e.g. ‘5’ instead of ‘Five’).
• Use sub-headings for every new topic you discuss in your article. They make it easier to see what your text is about in one glance. All sub-headings combined should be a small summary of your article.
• Use pictures and videos in your article, but only if they’re supportive of the article’s content. Visual content attracts attention, but it can also distract if it’s not a good match with what you’re writing about.
• Use captions for images and videos to explain its relation to the story you’re telling.
• When starting a new paragraph, put the most important message first.
• Print keywords in bold to make them stand out.
• Use bulletpoints for a list of items.
• Give hyperlinks a clear anchortext. “Click here to read more” is not a good anchortext because it doesn’t tell the reader what the result of a click will be. “Check out the full line-up” is a better alternative.

Our dear colleague Job gave a wonderful workshop on this specific topic. If you want to know more about Structure and Scannability please check out his slides or watch his lecture on demand!