What, you might ask, is that cartoon doing here? Well I’ve just been reading that running a visual element with text makes it three times more likely that at least some of the text will be read. So that extract from the First Dog Christmas card selection is a blatant attempt to gain influence for my wonderful words.

My thanks should go to Climate Progress for reminding me of the importance of illustrations and headlines. A study done by Poynter.org showed how few people actually read articles.

[Readers] see 56 percent of the headlines. But they are aware of only 25 percent of the text, and read just a portion of that. Only about 13 percent of the stories in the paper are read in any depth – that is, at least half-read. And that’s under the best of circumstances: These test subjects, frequent newspaper readers, were uninterrupted, supervised, and given prototypes with well-written, compelling stories.