Thanks to Dave Casali from readMedia in Albany, N.Y. for this simple tip about a common mistake I see regularly when I read press releases:
Nothing kills a reader’s momentum quicker than a section of text in all caps. Blocks of capital letters are extremely difficult to read, and tend to immediately turn readers off.
On average, upper case type is read approximately 13 percent slower than lowercase text. The reason for this is simple: Readers are used to lower case type, and actually view words as pictures, allowing them to put sentences together ahead of the point they’re reading. Using large blocks of capital letters cause readers to focus on individual words rather than taking in a whole sentence. Don’t let your message get lost in capitalized text!
That means no headlines written in all-caps either.
I just discovered Dave’s bi-weekly ezine “From the Tip Vault.” You can subscribe to it here.
He’s looking for other PR tips for his ezine. If you have one, email it to him. I’m sending him one right now about my free press release tutorial “89 Ways to Write Powerful Press Releases.”
Perhaps I’m overlooking it, but I can’t find the link to Dave’s ezine signup on that page?
I’m assuming that if you add your name and email address to the box in the upper-right corner of the website, you’ll start getting the ezine.
An additional reason to avoid ALL CAPS: it can get you blacklisted by some e-mail spam filters. So if you’re e-mailing a news release WITH AN ALL CAPS HEADLINE (or any text, for that matter) to a reporter, they may never see your handiwork!