Understanding what the reading brain is up to can help you create content that caters to it
Taking into account the fundamental tasks our readers' brains are executing when they encounter our content gives us the opportunity to offer up our ideas and messages in better ways. The benefit? Deeper engagement.
In the pursuit of an engaged audience, quality is imperative. Your writing, medium and design need to absorb the reader's attention, rewarding their efforts by stirring motivation and interest.
Remembering that attention is a component of visual perception helps us understand why the medium is often more important than the message when it comes to engaging someone.
It also speaks to why images and video typically grab attention more easily than a page of text.
In fact, de-coding theory argues that text accompanied by visuals improves our memory of the content. This has been substantiated by a number of studies, one of which shows how pairing of text and visuals improves the persuasiveness of the content by 43%.
When we bring our attention fully to what we watch or read, we stop 'seeing' the world around us and fall into the experience completely as our mind chews it over.
It's akin to flow, a state that Joe Molan, Social Historian and Author, describes as occurring "when you are in pursuit of something that feels both worthwhile and just the right amount of difficult."
Once attention has been granted, the reading brain is on the search for patterns it can establish between the text and the context. For writers creating content for commercial reasons, the efforts of the brain to establish meaning in text is another reason why audience profiling and personalization is important - you need to at least try to cater for the varying cognitive and experiential baggage your readers will bring to the encounter.
This means using tone, syntax, metaphor and white space - the very shape of the text - to direct attention towards what matters. "A magician's task," writes Moran, "is to direct the gaze, to decide what the audience lingers on. The same goes for the writer."
From a design perspective, using things like pull quotes, imagery, different font sizes and layouts all contribute to aiding how a reader cognitively navigates and interprets a piece of content.
Pairing text with imagery is proven to improve comprehension by more than 300%
An interesting subject presented in a boring way is increasingly unforgivable. A boring subject presented in an interesting way is an oxymoron. If you nail the execution, you can make dish water face off against unicorns in the battle for attention and win. There are a multitude of ways to accomplish this kind of feat, depending on your medium.
Sentence-processing research has shown how reading fresh metaphors briefly excites the brain in ways familiar ones, like surfing the web, do not. The brain appreciates the challenge of originality - as long as the meaning is still recognizable.
We already experience stories as though they are happening to us. So it stands to reason that giving readers even an ounce of control over the narrative engages the limbic system, the seat of emotion, even more. This can be done most profoundly by new mediums like VR, but for the humbler digital content creator, incorporating elements like video, virtual tours and polls. In print, fold-outs and pop-ups can offer moments of delight.
Complementary imagery is one way of setting tone, framing arguments and priming readers for particular responses. As is the use of white space to break down chunks of text into mouthfuls for the brain to savor before being offered up the next point to digest.
Engaging the emotional brain isn't just relevant to fiction writers; non-fiction writing - which includes thought leadership, newsletters, blogs and so forth - can better convince and convert readers through compelling use of language and design. Marketers take note.
