Archives for December 2011

Graphic storytelling teaches better than text The studies are in: If you want to communicate more clearly, use comics, cartoons, storyboards and other graphic storytelling approaches instead of or in addition to text. Here’s a sampling of the research: Parents answered 25% more questions correctly when they watched an animated cartoon explaining the need for polio … [Read more...] about Now you see it

Perform an act of commission When I conduct writing workshops at Tellabs, I always learn as much as I teach. One day, watching the Tellabs team edit a press release during a practice session, I was surprised to see George Stenitzer, vice president of Corporate Communications, wielding a highlighter instead of a pencil. Instead of cutting words, phrases and ideas he … [Read more...] about Turn Strunk & White on their heads

Make story lists easy to use on the go Jakob Nielsen recently redesigned a mobile website to make its story index more usable. Now you can steal his approaches for your own mobile site: 1. Add essential information. If it will help the visitor decide whether to click, add it. Nielsen added: Full headlines. Don’t truncate them. Decks, aka one-sentence summaries … [Read more...] about Mobile.com

Increase understanding by 51% Cartoons are worth at least 600 words, according to a series of studies by Richard E. Mayer, professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team of researchers. The researchers found that cartoons not only helped college students remember and understand complex physics lessons more than 600-word passages … [Read more...] about Cartoons communicate better than text