Readers who must read and readers who can stop
Some readers are obliged to read a document and others can stop at any sentence, and what the writing has to do differs between them. A reader who is free to leave has to be attracted and then held to the end, and even a reader who must read is more likely to keep going through a text that is easy to read. The kinds of reader also want different things from a text.
Forced readers and voluntary readers
A reader who must read a text for their job or for compliance is a forced reader. A patient with a chronic disease who is given a consent form before an operation or a treatment is obliged to read it for their own wellbeing, and so is a forced reader. A forced reader is very unlikely to stop even when the writing is very bad, and will go through almost any loops put in front of them to get the knowledge they need. In scientific and medical writing, readers such as scientists and doctors are very often forced readers, and one practitioner saw this in 2026 as the main problem scientists face as writers, because they write for people who often have no choice but to read them.
A forced reader usually wants efficiency, because reading is their job, and reading faster or with less energy can mean going home earlier. Such a reader does not have a lot of time, so it is still good to make a text easy for them to read. Many authors write a paper for themselves, because the science is theirs, but a paper written for its reviewers or its editor is more likely to be approved, even if that is not how it should ideally be. One writer whose documents go mostly to regulatory authorities counts most of their readers as forced readers, who do not read them for pleasure. Another, who writes for scientists and for regulators, finds them very different in scientific knowledge and profession, and the writing for them sometimes heavy reading with a lot of numbers.
A voluntary reader can choose to ignore a text, because they have infinite alternatives. Most people want to have a good time reading. A voluntary reader decides almost instantly whether to continue and will not work hard: someone who opens a health blog and does not like how it is written or structured, or does not get their questions answered quickly, clicks the back button and finds the next one. A voluntary reader who is not made to want to read will not read, and will not read writing that is bad. Most readers of scientific content always have the chance to stop, whether the text is a social media post or an article, as a bored webinar attendee can leave by pushing the red button.
Attention even from a reader who must read
Attention is not necessarily the default for many people, and someone who does not want to read something can usually leave. Content such as posts and blogs was in 2026 rejected by default, because readers were bombarded with stimuli: a person scrolling met another reel on Instagram, another infographic on LinkedIn and another thread on Twitter. Whenever a writer writes, the best assumption is therefore that the target reader does not actually want to read. The assumption holds even for a regulator, who may have just had lunch and feel tired, or may have just received an email notification and be choosing between the email and the document. A text that is easy to read makes that reader more likely to keep reading, to spend less energy and to understand better. Context matters as well: what will grab a reader's attention depends on their environment, and is very different for a regulator than for a patient.
Kinds of reader and what each wants
A broad division sorts readers into five kinds, although more than five types of person can read a text. Experts, such as regulators, researchers and doctors, want rigour, precision and data, are usually forced readers, and do not mind jargon because they will understand it, and jargon is fine to use when they do. Investors, who are sometimes forced readers too, want evidence of efficacy, market data and risk mitigation, which is very important to them, so a text for a company seeking investors should talk about the risk and the market impact. Patients can be voluntary or forced readers depending on their situation. Most patients are a subset of the general public with condition-specific expertise, who know a lot about their own condition; they understand some jargon but may not much like it, want to see how the text is relevant to them, and want information they can act on to feel better or to make a good decision. Patients should be treated as a separate kind of reader, because they are usually the ones who use a lot of the medical information. Some members of the general public read out of interest, and some because someone close to them is a patient or a doctor. Their health literacy is limited in general and varies in degree, they need context, jargon is a barrier to them, and they usually seek a benefit to themselves, such as improving their lifestyle or treating other people differently, though some just like science. Journalists want story angles, human interest and, usually, quotes.
Understanding why the reader reads
A writer who does not understand what the reader wants to hear can never give it to them, and one practitioner holds this understanding to be the core of scientific writing and of writing of every kind, because a writer who does not understand the audience and give them what they want has not succeeded and will never achieve the goals of the writing. A writer who understands the psychology of the audience, meaning why they want to read, what their situation and context are, what their education level is and what complexity of writing they are comfortable with, and how much energy they want to spend, will be very successful. The success meant is success with the reader and not with the client, because a scientific or medical writer is normally paid by someone who is not the person who reads the document.
Readers in their leisure time
Students and professionals often have to read texts they find exhausting or difficult, but the buyer of a pet magazine cannot be forced to read a certain article: a bored reader quits, switches on the television or goes for a walk with the dog. Writing about medical or biological issues for lay readers first of all means thinking about what is really interesting for the audience and what is important for them to know; what is exciting for a scientist may be boring for a lay reader. Being understood is just as important as an interesting subject. People reading in their leisure time do not want to look technical terms up or to think too hard, and give up on a sentence they do not understand immediately. Even a reader who is interested in the subject and thrilled by the story is not willing to spend half a day reading it. A former magazine editor found in 2013 that most readers prefer brief texts, and learned to keep texts short and simple.
Readers who read on impulse
Readers read on impulse as shoppers buy on impulse. A shopper who rushes to the market specifically for eggs passes the butter display, remembers that the butter is running low and takes some, then finds the aisle blocked by a display of tuna at a price too good to pass up and takes that too. So much is sold this way that without impulse buying most stores might be out of business or much smaller, and a shopper rarely buys only what is on the list or in mind. In an imagined case, doctors who take a journal home thumb through it without knowing what they want to read and skim until they spot something of interest, then notice an advertisement for something they forgot to order for the office, or a special illustration, chart or picture, stop and decide to investigate further. This is readership by impulse: something catches the eye and strikes a chord, and the reader reads what they had not expected to read. A person who starts at page 1 of a journal and reads straight through to the last page is rare. A columnist in an association's journal does not expect hundreds of members to turn with bated breath to the column: readers turn the pages, look at the contents and decide what to read and what to skip, and on reaching the column usually think either that its topic is dull or that its title sounds interesting.
Everything written, laid out or illustrated therefore has to be made to attract the impulse reader, and a writer must not think that everyone will read the text. A publication usually places an announcement or advertisement it wants most readers to see where a glancing eye might spot it, attached to a highly read area, which is why cover advertising costs so much more than advertising in the middle of the publication. One of the primary attractions is the topic: a subject that strikes a chord with the browser gets a reader, but most writers have little or no control over the topics they write on.
Attention on screens
By 2023 catching a reader's attention was getting harder, and keeping it to the end of a text harder still. Reading literacy rates were declining as screens replaced print newspapers, magazines and books, and one study found that digital media stimulate superficial reading strategies, namely scanning, skimming and browsing, at the expense of the more time-consuming ones that allow deeper comprehension. The tips found most often on the web for hooking the skim-reading, multitasking reader within three seconds, a figure that seemed to fall every few years, could be condensed to "write precious little" and "write the way you speak". Medical writing may be a profession where those rules of online publishing do not necessarily apply, and where a writer cannot add spice, explain the science so that a grandmother can understand it, or make the text personal.
Keeping the reader in mind
Most advice for writers stems from one key point, which is to keep the reader in mind while writing. Writing is an art even when it is meant to be purely informative, and writers are often absorbed by what they are creating, so it is easy for them to forget that they are not writing for themselves. Writing is also a form of communication, done to help others understand information, and empathy for the reader should be the underlying motive for writing in the first place. At each sentence the writer can ask how the information helps the reader and whether the sentence could be broken into two shorter ones to make it clearer.
Research on the chosen topic takes more time than the writing, and it is not wasted, because an incomplete or poorly researched piece is obvious and is sure to discourage a reader, even one who is not an expert in the field. Stating facts need not be dull: background information, eye-catching statistics and a few intriguing facts keep the narrative moving. A writer who has read so much about a topic is tempted to write about all of it, and this is the trap many writers fall into, overwriting. Trying to include every little detail inevitably leads to a wall of text at which the reader is likely lost, and thorough explanation has to be balanced against brevity.
Readers who will not read all of it
The knowledge that someone will read a piece motivates a writer to make it as good as possible, but however well researched and readable it is, many people, even interested ones, will not read all of it. Most will skim it, and some will read only the first and last paragraphs. It is only rational to accept this and be grateful for any form of readership, but not to work less hard, because even if only a few people read the whole text, they are the writer's readers, deserve the best of the writing and should find what they are looking for.
Irrelevance and boredom on the reader's journey
Accuracy is not enough, and a writer must also battle for the reader's attention among the distractions, misconceptions and conspiracies that abounded in 2022. The reader's journey can be seen as passing three adversaries in turn: irrelevance, boredom and, at the end, disappointment. The first step towards defeating irrelevance is audience analysis, for which Alley suggests three questions: who the readers are, why they are reading, and what they already know. The first and third questions are particularly important for a lay audience, whose health literacy and prior knowledge of the subject must shape the message, or it risks missing the mark. The second question helps avoid a common pitfall of scientific writing, a deluge of facts that does not highlight, and at times does not address, what the reader truly wants to know. Readers are interested in what they find valuable, and providing true value means trying to anticipate the questions that may arise in their minds and answering them.
By the heart of the document irrelevance has been defeated, but boredom is relentless: the heart is usually densely packed with information, so the reader's attention is more likely to wander there. The aim there, in Zinsser's words, is to maintain the tension that pulls readers along without their noticing the tug. The writer should say what needs to be said in its simplest form without oversimplifying, and propel the reader forward with action and verbs while giving them time to take in what they are reading.