It’s a little scary how quickly I will hit the “I agree” button just to make all that contractual verbiage disappear

G

ive me three pages of fine-print legalese to scroll through and then ask me if “I agree,” and you know that I will. It’s actually a little scary how quickly I will hit the “I agree” button just to make all of that contractual verbiage disappear. (I suspect I’m not alone here.) Sometimes I wonder if the people behind all this online paperwork are onto me and have conspired to pad their message with lines of unnecessary additional text, designed to overwhelm me and ensure that I don’t even think of attempting to read it all the way through.

If I were trying to encourage people to read some truly important but utterly boring block of text, I’d start by announcing an e-contest hidden within the copy. (Congratulations! If you have read this far, text SNORE to…) That ought to keep people scrolling.

But I digress. And maybe I’m not a good sample subject. Because as much as I enjoy the art of the written word, my eyes glaze over when I encounter technical or legal writing. At my first computer job, my mentor handed me half a dozen three-inch binders, detailing the inner workings of whatever computer operating system was in vogue 30 years ago. Perhaps it was that technical overload that left me traumatized for life.