What can you do about shrinking attention spans?

Research by Dr Gloria Mark suggests that office workers’ attention spans have shrunk to just 47 seconds. With less than a minute, how do you ensure: 

• your boss approves that spending
• stakeholders accept your recommendations
• customers follow instructions to install new software accurately
• new employees understand the contract they’re signing?

You’ve got to make your writing both engaging and efficient. One way to do this is with plain language.

At the tip of the engagement iceberg is prioritising the information your readers most need to know. Placing your recommendations, requests and findings early in your document means readers don’t have to work hard to find your main point. Complement your restructured information with information-rich headings that readers can use to understand each section and subsection of your document at a glance.  

We also recommend replacing jargon with familiar, everyday alternatives to support readers. This small change has big impacts for readers: more people will be able to understand you more easily and research suggests they may even be more likely to trust you. For example, replace business jargon, such as ‘reach out’, with an everyday alternative, such as ‘email’, ‘call’ or ‘contact’.  

There’s much more to be said about engaging readers, and much of it links to efficient writing. 

To communicate efficiently, choose shorter, more precise words that still convey your meaning. For example, replace ‘in order to’ with ‘to’. Fewer words to read means readers need to spend less time on your text (which also means they’ll have more time to consider your recommendations, requests or instructions).  

You can extend this advice to your sentences too – we recommend aiming for sentences of 15–20 words on average. To make your writing engaging, you’ll want to vary your sentence lengths, but this average ensures readers don’t lose the thread of what you’ve written as they tackle a 50-word sentence. (We promise we’re not exaggerating – we see them in the wild all the time.) 

Our last piece of advice for the moment (because concision is king) is: prefer the active voice. Using the active voice is transparent, direct and accountable. Plus, readers prefer it. It’s much easier for a reader to understand who is responsible for what. It means they’ll spend less time re-reading your writing to understand if they’re the one who has to email the new budget to the client.

While the research stating that the human attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s memory has been debunked, we still need to respect our readers’ time and get to the point quickly. At the very least, using plain language will save you money.  

For training to help you capture and retain readers’ attention, sign up for one of our workshops.

Or to get us to do the heavy lifting for you, contact our Consulting and Editing team.