Writing Content

A line of text on a web page takes 25% longer to read than on paper. Reading words on the screen is quickly tiring. Part of this has to do with the fact that what you see on the screen is composed of pixels, little bitty dots, that the eye/brain system must work harder to recognize as letters, words. The nearest analog is dot matrix printing, a pretty much obsolete technology for reading material. One consequence of this fact that screen text is more difficult to read is that viewers tend to skip over long sentences and phrases. A way to induce readers to stick with text online is to reduce the line length to about half the screen's width, or about 10-12 words. Writing for the web is one time when the writer may have a little control over how the writing will appear to most readers.