Made you look! The art of using color to get people to read.
Jenny Morse, PhD
Author and CEO
We all know that food motivates people. Whether it’s training a toddler to use the potty, or a 57-year-old telling herself that she can have a snack as soon as she finishes prepping tomorrow’s presentation, food operates on our brain as a reward.
At the same time, we know that most people do not want to read everything we write for work. Professionals skip over words, sentences, whole paragraphs, skimming our messages to read as little as possible and still be able to carry out whatever task the message assigns. We don’t want to read messages at work; we have to read messages at work. What this means is that most of us need external rewards in order to read.
I am not suggesting that you start offering your colleagues snacks when they read your emails.
But, a small strategy can trick people into looking at more of your message than they might otherwise have done: highlight words in yellow or green.
Research shows that the words for colors came into most of the world’s languages in the same order. The first color words are white, black, and red. These words are critical for a number of reasons. Black and white are the most significant contrasts and also correspond to light and dark, day and night, and the basic distinctions that our peripheral and night vision focus on. And these colors appear in our writing, with white as paper and black as ink. Even our pixelated Word docs still rely on white backgrounds and black text, partially out of habit, and partially out of convenience: the contrast is easy to read.
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Red is another critical color word because it is the color of blood. Many Eastern cultures take the positive view: blood is life. So, the color red has some more celebratory connotations and is often worn at weddings and other celebrations. Regardless of culture, red is powerful and vibrant. Many Western cultures associate blood with death, so the color red has a mostly negative connotation. Red gets our attention, but it’s a bit scary; think fire trucks, ambulances, etc. Regardless of culture, humans notice red because the color is associated with very high stakes. And in writing, we might mark up a document in red, Track Changes shows in red, corrections appear in red, mostly because red is easy to see against the white paper and black ink. But, since many of us have a slightly negative feeling around red, that feeling can be exacerbated by experiences where people are writing all over your work and making it appear to bleed.
In most languages the next color words that appear are yellow and green. Why? Because food. Yellow and green are the colors of plants and especially fruit, which has a high sugar content and is particularly tasty. Humans like sugar, so being able to see it, identify it, and describe it to others was beneficial. So, at a very subtle level, when we use the colors yellow and green, we signal people’s brains to look because there might be food!
Try highlighting a word or phrase in your own writing, usually a word that is otherwise buried in a paragraph of text. As people read our work messages, they mostly skim the first half of the first line of each paragraph. So, they are not reading all of the text, especially if we write very long sentences. They glance at the first half of the first line of each paragraph and skip on to the next one, only coming back to more content if they don’t understand something or need more information. With all that skimming, they might miss important information you’ve buried in a paragraph somewhere, like an important deadline or a critical step in a process. If that information is in the middle of a bunch of other things, you can use yellow or green highlights to draw their attention.
Try that on some of your work emails and see if people start noticing the important things you are writing about. And, don’t shame them if they keep getting up from their work spaces to get snacks. Afterall, you’re the one who made them think your email was going to bring them food.
