Reconsidering links in blog posts
I've been blogging for several years and have always delighted in sprinkling links throughout the text to give more context. In fact, a couple years ago I specifically increased the number of links I provided in many of my posts, believing that I was doing a service to the reader. I'm now considering reversing that trend everywhere that I post as I believe the style may actually be interfering with my ability to communicate.
In Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows1, there's a review of several studies indicating that articles containing embedded links actually decrease reading comprehension. From the book:
The test subjects who read the pages linearly actually scored considerably higher on a subsequent comprehension test than those who clicked back and forth between the pages. The links got in the way of learning, the researchers concluded.
These results were found in a number of other studies as well. In each study, participants were given the same material to read with and without links, and those who read the material without links always tested higher on comprehension exams later. This immediately made me think that I was doing my readers a disservice by including links directly in the text.
A former colleague once said of my blog posts, "judging by your posts, you don't seem to believe in the philosophy that Internet writing should be short and scannable." He was correct. Most of my posts are lengthy examinations or explanations of technologies and techniques. My intent is for the reader to learn something or, at the very least, understand my perspective on something. I hope that people print out my writing and refer to it later. I've always written more for that use case than the quick-scan to pick up some junk knowledge.
With this new information about how embedded links affect reading comprehension, I'm looking at changing how I make references in my online writing. My first thought was to simply not include any links at all, leaving them off completely and allowing the reader to explore the Internet for more information. But that seemed counter to the advantages that online reading offers. Links are something that cannot be duplicated in print, so just dropping them completely seems like the wrong approach.
The next idea that occurred to me is to use the old footnote/endnote paradigm that we were all taught in school. Instead of embedding a link in a paragraph, I would include a superscript number indicating that there is more information about this sentence. Then, I would include a list of references at the end of the post. You'll note that this post is written in such a manner.
I'm not sure if this is the approach I'll go with long term, but at least initially it seems like a good compromise. Numbered references at the end of a post still allow easy access to additional resources without disrupting the linear flow of the article text. I just want to give the readers of my online writing the best opportunity to learn as much as possible without distraction and I'm hoping that this will help.
References
- The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
December 30th, 2010 - 14:33
I like it. But I would suggest using a better means of sub/super scripting the index. As it stands, it wasn’t clear to me by reading the text that the 1 in fact denoted a foot note. But it’s an interesting approach, I might consider changing it too…
December 30th, 2010 - 14:43
Hmmm…also looks like my stylesheet is messed up a bit, so fixing that might help.
I’m open to other suggestions, as well.
December 30th, 2010 - 14:52
I’ve given this a fair amount of thought, as I detest reading entries that don’t cite any sources. I tend toward being link heavy, but I’ll need to read more about this ‘links reducing reading comprehension’ issue, as it interests me.
I will need to begin toying with this, though it makes me want to write a module to do WikiPedia-style footnote linking and highlighting as well.
December 30th, 2010 - 14:57
Another approach I’ve seen (almost the same) is to put the footnote number in square brackets and hyperlinked to the footnote.
Something I do in some posts is just a section of “Further reading” at the end, so I can link to related/useful articles, without upsetting the flow.
December 30th, 2010 - 15:01
Very interesting idea, indeed.
A couple of thoughts:
1. If there’s many of those footnotes (like 1-57 for instance), the footnotes might need to be in a collapsible container so as not to artificially “lengthen” the post’s page view.
2. Also if there’s many footnotes, it might get hard to do all the scrolling back and forth from the top to the bottom, so having the footnotes themselves linked as to the anchors to do the auto-scrolling might help. Yes, I realize this might defeat the purpose of not doing the links, but maybe it doesn’t hurt so much of the comprehension if the user stays on the same page.
3. Maybe this should be a togglable thing… like you can author your post to have links in it (embedded or as footnotes, whatever), and then simple javascript can show/hide those links. Like on sites that give users a font-size control, maybe their could be an embedded link/footnote control that lets them turn them on or off on the fly.
Thanks for this thought-provoking post. I may indeed experiment with the same ideas.
December 30th, 2010 - 16:53
A slight variation on Kyle’s #3 suggestion, no need to change to the footnote paradigm, make all your links not clickable, and have a javascript timeout that makes the links clickable after a predefined time period (depending on the length of the article) as to reward your readers. Silly and annoying, but I thought I mention it.
December 30th, 2010 - 17:14
Fascinating! I also try to link as much text as possible in my writings. I do not like the idea of omitting links entirely but if it really will help comprehension then I may consider footnotes too.
December 31st, 2010 - 03:03
Your writings are not so long for this kind of topic. They are not ad, they are real piece of (valuable) information. Footnotes are just “Back to the future”. If the user want to click the links, he click. If he don’t want to be “disturb”, he don’t click, or click opening a new tab for further reading (like I do).
“… Internet writing should be short and scannable”. There is Twitter for short message. We are not scanner machine. We are human being and we READ especially when the subjects are not so easy to understand.
And you are right: when the writing is interesting and need reflection, I print the page to study the concepts.
December 31st, 2010 - 08:38
@Kyle – Agree with your first point, a section with 50 links is probably too much. Perhaps it’s best to self-limit the number of external references used. I’m not a huge fan of using JavaScript to show/hide sections of an article that may be viewed in an RSS reader.
I thought about having the footnotes themselves be links a la Wikipedia, but even the act of having a link is distracting enough. The researchers basically said that each link represents a decision, and the more decisions in the midst of the text the more distracted the reader becomes. Perhaps the effect isn’t as bad with in-page links, but my initial theory is that removing the decision point is most important.
@fpiat – It’s not about the user choosing to navigate away or not, the research has shown that simply providing the option to navigate away is enough to distract the reader from deeper comprehension. It’s a distraction, whether you click on it or not. I want to remove that distraction.
December 31st, 2010 - 13:09
It’s most like very efficient and true, but for the kind of articles who’s goal is to give knowledge.
Removing the links completely is not good – many people actually go and follow up so condensing them at the bottom is probably the best approach.
Linking to a footnote is debatable – if people can click to footnote and then back (see Wikipedia), is almost as distracting as clicking away, but in some cases might be required if you feel that people will not read the whole article and never get to a list of links below by scrolling.
I always open them in background tabs so I was also thinking about forcing links to open in another window, but it might not be necessary if they are in footnotes.
April 8th, 2011 - 11:31
Wow, i think it’s awesome that you are considering this and are that concerned about your readers’ comprehension. I agree, though, with fpiat that this is a mistake.
If you use naturally-worded links like you do (your post “Be here now” is a good example), the links don’t even break the flow of the sentence. When you make an interesting point with a link to back up your statement, i just naturally ‘command-click’ the link into my ‘tab-queue’ to read once i’m finished with an article. (This also gives the referred-to page time to load so i can read it as soon as i get to it.)
Unfortunately, Wikipedia-style footnote links break this reading flow. And often by the time i get to the footer the links are out of context and it’s not clear which ones i had wanted to read.
My personal preference would be to keep links in your post, but only reveal them (color + underline) when the content is hovered (or focused). That would remove the distraction of the links but keep their utility. Although most of my reading is in my feed reader which won’t use the CSS, I’d still have an option to read the unbroken article on your site.
Regardless of what you choose, i think it’s great that you are thinking about the needs of your readers. So, thanks!
April 24th, 2011 - 12:23
I’m with Nick Morgan; don’t use super-scripted footnotes (or bracketed ones), which are yet another distraction and just put a “further reading” section at the end. I really get annoyed when reading books that use footnotes (I like to read history books for enjoyment) and some authors like to pepper the pages with footnotes and I feel like I’m missing something by not following the footnote, and it definitely upsets the flow. Sometimes it’s just unessential interesting information so I’ve disciplined myself to ignore the footnotes, but it’s still annoying.