Mobiles need the meat up front

Our touch-screen scrolling thumbs are getting more of a work out than ever before. And just today the Financial Times revealed that a quarter of their www.ft.com users read articles on their smartphones. I have a feeling that fraction will only get bigger.

That’s why it’s even more important to think hard about your main point before you reel off an email to your workmates. Our smartphones may be smart, but their screens are much smaller than our desktop screens. So if you’ve left the meat of your message till the end, or buried it among the background info, there’s more chance of the most important thing getting lost.

So ask yourself, what do you need your reader to do? What do you really need them to know? And put that up front. Then they can flex their scroll-thumb at their leisure and read all the background stuff having already understood the main point of the email.

0 min read, posted in Writing tips, by Admin, on 27 Jul 2012