Blog Analysis Assignment

The blog post, Because Reading is Fundamental, by Jeff Attwood is about how many readers of a finish an article before commenting. The article is targeted at people age 18-40, bloggers, and journalists. The intended audiences will be mostly high school graduates up to college/university graduates. People under the age of 18 are unlikely to be interested in the statistics of who finishes reading articles. Bloggers and journalists are the primary audiences for this blog post as it directly affects how many people are interested in their blogs or articles.

Attwood introduces the piece by showing an account profile, and the important part of the profile is the post count. Showing an image is a smart way to draw in the reader as it immediately draws interest. It is also important that it reflects the article well, as his intention is how to make people interested in reading posts instead of immediately commenting. The main argument of the piece is to show that people focus on commenting on a post and not reading it, since it appears on their profile. On most websites, commenting on posts rather than reading them is rewarded. Rewarding comments is a bad strategy for people to gain interest and read since a person can immediately comment without even looking at the first word of the article. Attwood is trying to prove that enforcing reading is a better plan than using comments.

Attwood uses two pieces of research to convince readers of his message. The first piece of research is the Ars Banana Experiment done by Ars Technica in 2011. In this experiment, they wrote an article which asked part way through for readers to comment banana below. This shows that not many people read an article before commenting. The first person to write the word banana was on the third page. This is an effective example of how few people read an entire article.

 The second piece of research is the Slate Experiment by Farhad Manjoo, This bit of research has Manjoo collecting research on the number of people that finish an article. Many visitors to an article do not even scroll down the page, and 50% read around half of it. This example shows that most people will not finish an article they have started.

Attwood lists a few solutions to the problem. The first of which is to prevent pagination. Pagination is when a person reaches the bottom of a page and cannot be bothered to click to the next. One possible fix would be to automatically load the next page once the reader reaches the bottom. The second solution is to record the time spent reading. This is like displaying post count but instead measures the time read to make a person more intent on reading and caring less about commenting. The third solution is to reward reading, adding a badge after reading a long article is one example. The fourth solution is to load new content without sacrificing a person’s reading place. For the most part, the article is well written and encourages people to think about reading more than commenting.