Captions and Subheads – Attract Your Audience

“The middle [often] has no recognizable sequence of ideas, no flow of cause and effect, and no narrative, just puddles of information.”
— Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar, Poynter Institute; and Don Fry, writing coach

What is this person doing to pull in the reader. A strong caption pulls even harder. Notice your eyes are moved to the caption?

Pull Readers into your story with captions and subheads. Don’t take our word for it, here’s this:

“No task involved in producing a newspaper has a greater disparity between its importance to the reader and its attention from most newsrooms than writing cutlines,” writes Steve Buttry, American Press Institute’s director of tailored programs.

“Too often, they are the first thing the reader reads (sometimes even before the headlines) and the last thing the newsroom slaps together.”
Handled well, captions can be workhorses of communication.

Don’t Cut Your Head Off

While were on the topic of headlines, Google will only allow 63 characters in their search results, so to avoid getting your head cut off, Keep your headlines to 55 characters for working across all social media platforms.

See examples below that won’t irritate the reader trying to guess the last words of the headline:

Google doesn’t read stories, people do. Write for people