The Inter­net may be chang­ing how we read and think, accord­ing to a five-year study by schol­ars at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege London.

The schol­ars doc­u­ment­ed the behav­iour of vis­i­tors to two pop­u­lar research sites that pro­vide access to jour­nal arti­cles, e‑books, and oth­er sources of writ­ten infor­ma­tion. They found that peo­ple using the sites exhib­it­ed “a form of skim­ming activ­i­ty,” spring­ing from one source to anoth­er. More­over, vis­i­tors rarely returned to any source they’d already vis­it­ed. They typ­i­cal­ly read no more than one or two pages of an arti­cle or book before they would vis­it anoth­er site.

The authors of the study note: “It is clear that users are not read­ing online in the tra­di­tion­al sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “read­ing” are emerg­ing as users “pow­er browse” hor­i­zon­tal­ly through titles, con­tents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid read­ing in the tra­di­tion­al sense.”

Patrick Kings­ley of the Guardian wrote an arti­cle about this phe­nom­e­non: “…because of the Inter­net, we have become very good at col­lect­ing a wide range of fac­tu­al tid­bits, we are also grad­u­al­ly for­get­ting how to sit back, con­tem­plate, and relate all these facts to each other.”

When I am using the Inter­net, I typ­i­cal­ly skim con­tent and often feel rushed. Most of the time, I’m research­ing con­tent with a def­i­nite goal in mind—such as draft­ing an arti­cle like this one!

How does this change affect our writ­ing? Usabil­i­ty guru Jakob Nielsen found that most read­ers’ eyes focus on the action-ori­ent­ed con­tent, such as prod­uct fea­tures and bul­let­ed lists. If read­ers encounter intro­duc­to­ry text on web pages, users often skip it. Nielsen calls intro­duc­to­ry para­graphs “blah-blah text.”

But intro­duc­to­ry text does have a role. He writes: “A brief intro­duc­tion can help users bet­ter under­stand the rest of the page. Even if they skip it ini­tial­ly, they might return lat­er if it does­n’t look intim­i­dat­ing­ly long and dense.”

He rec­om­mends writ­ers include the fol­low­ing content:
1) What’s the page about? A brief intro­duc­tion can help users bet­ter under­stand the rest of the page.
2) Why should read­ers care? What’s in it for them?

In this age of hur­ried read­ing, Nielsen’s research makes sense to me. Still with me?