Secrets Of Effective Article Writing: - Use lots of White Space(1)

On the internet people read differently to how they read newspapers and books. Generally people are in a hurry whilst they are on the internet. They do not have all day to browse and as such, they like to read in ‘chunks’ of information.

What this means is writing small paragraphs or even ‘one sentence’ paragraphs will go a long way to impact the people.

With small paragraphs there is a lot of ‘white space’ in the background

By way of comparison, take a look at your local newspaper. It is mostly covered in writing. There is very little ‘white space’ in the background.

 There are 2 main reasons for this:

Newspaper readers generally take their time to read the newspaper. If they read a story they tend to read the whole story. They also can be selective in which story they read. So if someone is only interested in sport they can quickly flip to the sports section and read there. They may read nothing else in the entire newspaper.

The second reason is advertising. The newspaper has to fit as much advertising as possible into the newspaper without it looking like one big advertisement.

On the internet, people usually visit one site at a time and read one piece of information at a time. They do not have lots of different articles like in a newspaper.

The solution is to space out the article.

Write in shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs.

And use more ‘white space’.

You can read more quickly.

Your eyes are moving more rapidly.

But when you cram  in a lot of text in one paragraph a reader can quickly get bored reading on the internet. The internet user likes to move quickly and take quick actions. They are generally well-educated people and often know what they are looking for. By spreading out the information they can quickly scan it and concentrate on the most important parts. But if the information is packed into long paragraphs they may go somewhere else then you have lost your reader and they may never come back.

People have limited time. You will need to get your message across quickly and easily and they will enjoy your article. Use lots of white space, or lots of background.