The Rule of 7 and Effective Writing
If you’re not interested in effective writing or have mastered the skill of writing skip this blogpost. If you’re like me and always on the lookout for tips to make things more effective, this one if for you!
Block quotes are one of the three attention-grabbers when scanning an article to see if it’s worth reading. Read the blogpost to discover the other two.
Yesterday I dug up and old syllabus from my previous education as therapist. It was about effective writing and there were some nice pointers in there I really want to share with you. Over the years there have been a lot of blogposts and entire blogs on writing effectively. But as of yet there is one rule in my syllabus that I haven’t found out there yet. It might be, it might not be, at least now it’s here on this blog.
The rule of seven:
- No more than 7 sentences to a paragraph
- No more than 7 paragraphs to a chapter
- No more than 7 chapters to a text
With a margin of 2 on all these.
The word count
Simple isn’t it? But there is more of course. The maximum length of a sentence that people can comprehend is related to education. It’s bit harsh but people who didn’t finish high school can’t handle sentences the way academics can. If you want to write a text that’s readable for everyone sentences should be no longer than 10 words. High School drop-outs can take 14 words and 24 words is a suitable length for academics. It’s not set in stone but it’s a good guideline to keep in mind when writing. Who is your audience? It’s quite easy to overestimate your readers.
Combining these two rules we get between 1250 and 7290 words to a text for everybody, and 3000 to 17496 words for academics. Somewhere in the order of 7000 words seems the ideal length for the typical eBook and 980 for a blogpost. All these are rough estimates of course but using these you can expect that an eBook over 17500 words long will surely be a bit on the long side.
Improving readability can be done by including underlines, bold, and italics but especially underlines are not a particular good idea in blogposts. After all, links in blogposts are almost always underlined and you could send the wrong signal. A text full of underlined words at first glance would seem like a text full of links. It could get even worse if you underline a word and make it blue as well. Now surely your first impression is that it’s a link. Did you try and click it?
Subheadings
are another way of grabbing attention and dividing a text to improve readability. It draws the attention and effective subheadings will almost lure the reader deeper into the text. The title of the article is the first thing people see and so that too should grab attention while covering the essence of the article. Not to long and definitely to the point, it should leave the reader with the feeling of “I need to read this”. These aren’t all the tools you have to write effectively. Blogreaders are a special breed of readers, they want the information in quick, scannable bits and are always in a hurry. As a blogger you can help your readers with that and provide highly scannable content.
One of the easiest things to scan is the:
- The list
- it’s short
- easy to scan
- and provides structure
- see what I mean?
Chances are you already scanned the list before actually reading the blogpost. Together with the subheadings these are two of the three most scannable features in any blogpost. The last one you’ve probably already scanned as well before deciding to read this post. It’s the block quote at the beginning of this blogpost. These three text-based eye catchers are what grabs you at a first glance. (Four if we count the title of the blogpost.) That leaves us with one non-text eye catcher that is absolutely crucial. A picture is worth a thousand words and doesn’t increase the word count! A bad picture or no picture at all will seem dull and uninspiring. The right picture makes or breaks a blogpost.
The closing line to a blogpost is where you make your statement. Use all the tools you have, make your blogpost scannable, make a clear statement, and don’t forget to write both a good opening and closing line, they really matters.
Some nice tips here. I do some of this already but a few new ones I’ll implement. Like your zen theme – thanks!
Never heard that 7 rule before. It makes sense to break up paragraphs that are longer. What does it say about minimums? Also I like the information about word counts, both for types of readers and for projects.
Hi Ralph, good to see you hear again.
The minimum is roughly 5 sentences, 5 paragraphs and 5 chapters. They aren’t set in stone of course but keeping them in mind is a good idea when writing.
The number of words I calculated using 5,5,5 and 9,9,9 with 10 and 24 words per line. They are only estimates but writing a text with well over 10,000 words for “everybody” is a bit on the long side.
I hope this answers your question
Thanks for the visit, the comment and the compliment Marc :)
I really like this idea of “7″. Another technique I use is to go back through an article, once I’ve finished writing it, and removing 10%. This way I get rid of a lot of the rambling!