Monday, December 26, 2005

Long Copy vs. Short Copy

According to a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of Americans read literature for pleasure. That’s a drop of 10 percent since 1982. For younger people, the drop was 28 percent.

Reading, it seems, is no longer a pleasure. It’s become a chore.

Does this mean long copy is dead? I think in many cases, the answer is yes. But much depends on the mindset of your audience and the value they perceive in reading about you.

For example, I’m working on a project selling Alaska cruises.

For lead generation purposes, our goal is to ask people to raise their hand and indicate interest. A few paragraphs (and a good offer, of course) is all it takes to get a response.

But when it’s time to ask for a booking, we need to say more. Interested prospects want to learn more about all they’ll see and do. Indeed, if a trip to Alaska has long been a dream, then reading about it is a pleasure.

In the B-to-B world, however, reading is rarely a pleasure, so shorter copy generally works best. Everything from promotional emails and mailings to white papers and case studies must be concise enough to respect your prospect’s time.

You should also know that according to some of studies I’ve read, people read printed documents up to 30 percent faster than the same material presented online. So for email and the web, cut your copy by yet another one third.

In the end, however, readership depends less on the number of words you use, but how you arrange them. You need to make your copy seem as if it’s a quick read.

A 250-word piece of copy that runs as one paragraph from beginning to end will be read only by those few with the keenest of interest.

However, the same 250 words split into several paragraphs will seem far less massive. Adding a couple of subheads and a set of bullet points will help even more.

So far this post is 336 words. And I think that’s just about enough for now.

Posted by Richard Bloch

Permalink