How people read: print and online publications

Five times more people read headings than the actual text. People remember information more effectively when it comes in bits and chunks.

The situation becomes even more critical online, where distractions are never further than a mere swipe or mouse click away. One early study showed that the decline in display reading performance could be as high as 40% or more when compared to the same text read from paper. More recent studies, however, show less dramatic results. New generations of readers do not read worse on a screen than on paper but, on the whole, focused reading skills are in decline. As writers, we can choose to decry that and loose most readers or we can take modern reading habits into account when we write.

Many on-screen readers scan pages rather than reading them word for word. Researchers refer to this as nonlinear reading. Readers pick out a few sentences or even parts of sentences to get the information they want. Online readers are far more prone to nonlinear reading than paper readers.

In a recent experiment from the University of Stavanger in Norway, 50 students were given the same text to read. Half of the students read it on paper. The other half read it on a digital reader. There were surprisingly few differences between the two groups, but one stood out: the students who had read from paper were far better at reconstructing the plot of the story. The researcher, Anne Mangen deduced that what digital readers lacked was knowledge of how far they had progressed into the story. They lacked a mental map.

This is important for us who publish primarily online. It means that we need to structure our publications even more deliberately than before.