Comments on: #FridayFact: F-Shaped Reading Pattern

By: Moqi Zhang

Moqi Zhang — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 04:01:54 +0000

In my opinion, it is funny but true that I pay more attention to the first paragraph, but for the rest of article, I will read so quickly until I found a funny topic or significant things.
I think I need divided article into several parts, and use the subtitle to tell the reader the topic of next paragraph. Meanwhile, it is helpful that we write a summary of the paragraph in the first sentence, and summary of the whole article in the first paragraph.

By: Daniel Ott

Daniel Ott — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 10:16:22 +0000

I feel that this study is 100 percent accurate. I know I do this sort of reading all the time, especially when I am in a rush to find information or am just being lazy. I often skim headings and the first word of line to see if I can find context clues to help find what I am really looking for. I also feel like the faster someone is reading something, the more likely they are to read in this F-shaped pattern. Additionally, I feel like people who read like this often have to go back and re-read the writing because they accidentally skipped over important information.
There are a few ways to help force the reader to avoid reading only in this F-shaped pattern. One that came to mind is to include headers. This will give the overall idea of what information is located in this section of the writing. The next way is to create lists with bullet points. This can help reduce the fluff people often include in writing and condense the information for the reader. Finally, I would try and avoid large paragraphs. I feel like this often scares readers away from reading the entirety of the paragraph. It would be better to split it up into multiple smaller paragraphs.

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 02:20:32 +0000

I think the most interesting part of the search result behavior is that search engines have actually changed to accommodate it. Search engines used to try to basically return as many relevant results as possible, even marginally-relevant ones (low-precision and high-recall), but upon noticing that their users only ever looked at the first few results before trying a completely different query, they changed their retrieval algorithms to focus on increasing relevance of the first several results and stopped caring so much about returning all relevant results (high-precision and low-recall). Most interestingly, this algorithm change may actually be contributing to a feedback loop wherein the tendency to only look at the first couple results is reinforced!

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 02:09:03 +0000

There do in fact seem to be mirrored results for right-to-left languages, as the first article mentions “our recent round of eyetracking research also showed that in right-to-left languages such as Arabic, people read in a flipped F-shaped pattern (as we had predicted but had not seen prior to this research).” It would be interesting to see how these patterns differ in vertical text as you said, but also because those languages tend to have higher information density, but also lack certain emphasis tools such as italics. I suspect the effect might be even more pronounced in those cases.

By: Justin Du

Justin Du — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 02:07:44 +0000

This study is applicable to everything that you write in day to day situations. Whether its a blog post on reddit or a professional email, people seem to have the attention spans of fish in today’s world. This includes myself as after reading the article I realized how often I do this. I think this proves how important it is to draw in readers early to keep them interested in what you want to say and prove your point once you have them drawn in once they are invested in what you’ve written. I think this study can also see some parallels with videos as well. I think people often watch the very beginning of videos and skip to milestones to see if the video is worth-while before watching the entire 20 minute video they may not be intereted in.

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 01:59:07 +0000

Oops, replied to the wrong person!

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 01:56:34 +0000

“Include the most important points in the first two paragraphs on the page.”

I think this is the most important takeaway from the first link. Much of the content on the internet is overly verbose relative to what most of the people consuming it actually need out of it. I certainly appreciate “slow journalism” from time to time, but most of the time, I just want to quickly find the main point or argument of a piece and don’t care about all the fluff that’s necessary to pad it out into a professional-looking article or blog post.

I really appreciate it when people pull-quote the sentence or paragraph containing the main argument when sharing stuff on social media, so I don’t need to waste my time reading the whole link if the argument is uncompelling. I certainly try to do that when I share things.

By: Faizal Zulkifli

Faizal Zulkifli — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 04:05:47 +0000

I did not realise this fact before but knowing it now really helped me in shaping the way I write my emails or assignments in the future. The thing that I think can help in adapting to this type of reading pattern is setting the paragraphs and alignments right. In other words, we always have to make sure there is not too much lines in a single paragraph because long paragraphs would surely distract the reader skimming it and end up skipping the whole paragraph.

By: Kimberly

Kimberly — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 20:00:21 +0000

I had never really thought about how I read a document, but after reading this and thinking about reading through websites, technical manuals, textbooks, and various construction documents I realized that this is exactly how I examine a document. I look for headings and specific words and rarely ever read anything word for word. As with Thursday’s infographic about document design, I believe that this information will be helpful in my Senior Capstone design class this semester. The final product is a document that will contain between 100-125 of information in response to a design proposal. With this in mind, by placing key words in this F-shaped pattern it will draw attention to those important elements of our final proposal and design as our professors are reading and grading our submission.

By: Cassie Bienert

Cassie Bienert — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 00:50:49 +0000

As with the strong email advice, It makes a difference what device you are reading content on. The use of mobile devices vs computes will change the formatting of a website or email. Thus, it makes it hard to adopt the F shaped writing pattern (I do complete agree with it as I have been reading a lot of scientific articles recently and I tend to scan quickly through them). Considering this, I think the use of headings, content breaks, font changes, lists, etc. is more important that the physical location of words. Even when you rotate your cell phone screen for easier reading, the layout changes – it would be hard to control where your important words fall.

You also might consider making a “mobile version” of your webpage. I am not sure if this is something commonly done but it would help you adjust your writing to optimized the layout on any reading device.