Length Matters

Research shows that if most readers look at a page with 8 or 9 dense paragraphs of type, their willingness to read it at all goes down significantly, compared to a communication of 5 paragraphs. This is especially true when major change is swirling around your organization and people are time-stressed.

If you let your CEO send an emailed announcement to everyone with over 600 words, readership will not be optimum. But the low-readership penalty for 800 words or more is harsher. If you think that the only result will be that the employee may merely skim it or stop reading after the first few paragraphs, think again. They won’t read any of it. They skip it.  Gone.  Most figure they don’t have the time to tackle it, and you’ve just lost the chance to impart any information.

Here’s what the experts recommend, and I can attest to this advice based on my own experience:

Target length is 400 words. This will take the average reader two minutes to read. So given the 3-second average time people spend previewing “general distribution” work emails, 100 words is even better. Some internal communicators aim for 300 words.

You simply can’t let a long communication go out to staff levels that, for example, explains a re-organization in detail and then profiles four or five new leaders and their roles. You should, instead, just summarize the re-org and the “why,” then link to their profiles in deeper content/resources on your intranet.

You’re looking at about 285 words in this blog post, so a 300 to 400 word target for your internal communication is not much longer.  My next post will look at research on optimal sentence and paragraph length.