Write for the Skimmer, Not the Scholar

When I write something for a website, I try to picture the person who will read it. Not the person I wish would read it. The person who actually will. And the person who actually will is standing in line somewhere, holding a phone, giving me about four seconds before deciding whether to keep going.

This is not the reader most people write for. Most people write for an imaginary scholar: someone sitting at a desk with time and attention, who will read every paragraph in order, follow the argument, and appreciate the careful qualifications. That reader almost never shows up. The reader who shows up is a skimmer. They bounce down the page looking for the one thing they came for, and if they don’t find it fast, they leave.

Once you accept this, a lot of conventional writing advice inverts. Long, well-constructed paragraphs stop being a virtue. Impressive vocabulary stops being a virtue. Anything that makes the reader slow down and work becomes a cost, and you should only impose that cost when the idea genuinely requires it. Usually it doesn’t. Usually the idea is simple and the complicated sentence is decoration.

When I built GazeSite, I had to decide what “readable” should mean for a machine that grades websites. I ended up telling it to read every page as a distracted person on a phone would, at roughly an eighth-grade reading level. Some people bristle at that number. It sounds like an insult to their audience. But reading level isn’t intelligence level. Plenty of brilliant people read at an eighth-grade level on their phones, because that’s what skimming is. When you skim, you’re not parsing sentences. You’re pattern-matching. Short words and short sentences pattern-match faster. That’s the whole trick.

I’ve noticed something else: writing simply is much harder than writing impressively. Anyone can take a plain idea and dress it up. The dressing-up is almost automatic; it’s what school trains you to do. Stripping an idea down to its plainest form takes real work, because you have to understand the idea completely. Every vague phrase in a sentence is a place where the writer didn’t quite finish thinking. Complicated writing hides that. Simple writing exposes it. So simple writing is not just kinder to the reader. It’s more honest.

There’s a common objection here, which is that skimmable writing is dumbed-down writing, and that catering to skimmers means giving up on depth. I don’t think that’s right. Depth and difficulty are different things. A deep idea expressed plainly is still deep. What you give up when you write for the skimmer is not depth but ornament, and ornament was never doing the work you thought it was. If anything, plain sentences let depth show through, the way clean glass lets you see what’s behind it.

The other objection is that you shouldn’t have to write this way, that a good reader would slow down. Maybe. But you don’t get to choose your readers’ habits any more than a shopkeeper gets to choose the weather. People read on phones, in fragments, between other things. You can resent that or you can design for it. Resenting it produces pages that feel important to their authors and empty to everyone else. Designing for it produces pages that get read.

What does designing for it look like in practice? Put the point first. Not the background, not the setup, the point. A skimmer decides whether to stay based on the first thing they see, so the first thing they see should be the reason to stay. Then keep paragraphs short, because a skimmer’s eye lands on the start of paragraphs, and every paragraph start is another chance to catch them. Then cut. Then cut again. The sentence you’re proudest of is often the one to delete, because pride is a sign you were writing for yourself.

None of this is new. Newspapers figured it out a century ago; they called it the inverted pyramid, and they used it because their readers were also skimmers, just with paper instead of glass. What’s new is that we can now measure it. When I run a scan on a page, the readability findings are rarely surprising, but they are usefully embarrassing. A wall of text I’d convinced myself was fine turns out to take a determined reader to get through, and my readers are not determined. Nobody’s are.

The strange thing is that writing for the skimmer made my writing better for the scholar too. The rare patient reader doesn’t suffer from short sentences and front-loaded points. They read faster and understand more, same as everyone else. I can’t think of a single reader who benefits from a page being harder to read. Which suggests the skimmer was never a special case to accommodate. The skimmer is just the reader, seen clearly, without flattery.

So write for them. Say the thing. Say it early, say it plainly, and stop when you’ve said it. The scholar you were imagining will forgive you. They might even thank you.