How to Reduce Friction in Your Stories

Make your writing easier to read, so readers don’t get rubbed the wrong way (no math skills required)

In my corporate days, I learned a nifty trick practiced by the teams responsible for getting internet visitors to sign up for newsletters, buy stuff, or otherwise engage deeper into a site: Reduce friction at every step of the process, especially the initial steps.

The theory is that if the initial ask is easy—let them see what they came to see without getting in the way—a visitor is more apt to become engaged and maybe even give something to get something. Once you have them engaged, you might get their email address in exchange for a newsletter or a helpful PDF file, and maybe eventually they’ll make a purchase. But any ask that’s unreasonable early on is friction.

We can apply this logic to our nonfiction writing, with each and every story, particularly when aiming for a mass audience of lay readers. Readers want a smooth path through your forest of paragraphs, sentences and phrases. Don’t make it hard for them. Don’t ask too much of the readers. Don’t create friction.

In thinking about how to ease friction in our writing, we can borrow another concept from online company execs: The funnel. There are various ways the funnel is described and employed, but in essence it goes something like this:

The purchase process on a website that sells goods or services can be thought of as a funnel. At the big wide mouth of the funnel are all the people who visit the site. At the narrow end are those who go on to make a purchase. There are, roughly speaking, three types of visitors:

• CURIOUS PEOPLE: The bulk of visitors, who are just window shopping and may have been intrigued by a headline or found the site in a search for information. They’re not ready to buy and so need to be enticed down the funnel, but odds are slim they’ll get there.

• POTENTIAL BUYERS: A larger contingent who are interested in a certain product or products, but they’re still gathering information before they decide whether to proceed. If the site is well engineered and the product selection is right—and there’s not too much friction—there’s a good chance they’ll move through the funnel.

• BUYERS: A handful who are prepared and eager to buy something, decision made, credit cards at the ready, hoping to get straight through the funnel. Stay out of their way!

The goal for site engineers, designers and content people is to make the purchase process, and the whole site experience, as frictionless as possible, so that the BUYERS get straight to what they want, the POTENTIAL BUYERS are encouraged to take steps and ideally follow the process to the end, and even the CURIOUS PEOPLE are satisfied. Friction is the enemy of all three visitor types.

Your story’s potential audience can be thought of similarly.

• A few readers—the BUYERS, to leverage our analogy—will eat your stuff up, no matter what. They come into the story committed, either to the topic or the writer or both, and it’s not hard to keep them engaged to the end—even if your story is really, really long and kinda dry. It’s not that they aren’t judgemental, it’s just that they either really need this information in your story or they’ve got nothing better to do. Nothing stops them. You welcome them, but they’re not a big enough contingent to be your target audience.

• Far more readers, the POTENTIAL BUYERS, are really interested in your story (they loved the headline, and the topic is very interesting and/or important to them) but they’re tentative, picky. They don’t need what you’re offering, or they don’t have time to spend more than a few minutes with it. If they get bored, or you trip them up with a confusing passage or a word they don’t understand, or you fill your presentation with useless doo-dads that are visually obstructive (not to mention credibility killers) they’re out. You cannot afford to lose these folks, and if you serve them well, you just might get them to read to the end and maybe even like and subscribe.

• The CURIOUS PEOPLE are your biggest potential audience, but they’re also the flightiest. The slightest distraction or frustration sends them clicking off to the next bit of eye candy. Only the most engaging and frictionless stories will hold their interest, so that’s what you want to deliver, because there are just too many of these readers to ignore.

Serving these three types of readers isn’t mutually exclusive. This is not about dumbing a story down. It’s about smooth, entertaining, informative, frictionless writing, which will appeal to them all.

Thing is, there are many, many ways to introduce friction in a story—including some I bet you haven’t given much thought. Creating friction is easy. Eliminating it is harder. Let’s start with an easy one that writers often don’t think about.

1) Don’t let mediocre images get in the way. Unless an image actually speaks a thousand words, it’s just friction. Use an image (or images) that help tell your story. Don’t overload the presentation with stock images of mundane objects thinking that’ll keep readers going. Words keep readers going. That’s why we call them readers! (Related: How to Optimize Image Selection and Placement)

Sometimes, if a story needs an image (for the thumbnails and so forth) but you don’t have a compelling one, pick something but place it down at a point in your story where it’s most relevant, thereby avoiding the visual friction at the top.

I didn’t have a great idea for an image for this story. So this is it. Yuk. Credit: Mets501/CC BY-SA 3.0

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OK, here comes some serious friction… Below, which means behind the paywall, are are 7 more ways to reduce friction in every story you write. And right now you’re reading a marketing message. The paywall exists because I put a lot of effort into these weekly posts, and while I hope all subscribers have learned something useful above, I won’t mind if a few of you become paid subscribers to help me continue giving back to the writing community in this way.