Tighten your middle – Stop boring your customers

Is your middle taunt? Try LATCH

Mobile users are in a hurry and get angry when looking at sites that waste their time with too much text.

Tighten up your middle content.

You’ve created this great lead story, now how often do we become verbose and lose our reader. We need to strengthen our core. We often write without really knowing where we are going after our initial lead.

The body of the story should tell more about the story in detail. The graphics and subheads tell where you are going, and the body is the detail.

You can whip the body of your story into shape by creating a form to follow when writing your copy.

People don’t drive alphabetically, points out Richard Saul Wurman, author of Information Architects. Why, then, are atlases organized that way?

LATCH

To avoid a flabby middle, figure out how your readers would really use your information. Then choose one of these five organizing principles to whip your body into shape.
Wurman uses the acronym LATCH to demonstrate how to organize information. “There are only five ways to do it,” he says. They are:

• Location. Move geographically — city to city, state to state or country to country, for instance.
• Alphabet. Organize from A to Z.
• Theme. Tackle your topic categorically.
• Chronology. Progress from beginning to middle to end.
• Hierarchy. Structure from most important to least.