People don’t read in a predictable, orderly way.
That is number ten in a list of fifteen called ‘Powerful Psychological Secrets of Direct Mail.’  Sounds interesting huh!  Anyways why I am bringing up number ten here?  Because it is the first one that I read.

The actual paragraph says, “People seldom read in a linear fashion, beginning to end.  They skip around, try to find meaning quickly, and usually don’t read closely unless they are interested.”

Why did I go directly to this one part of the list?  It was in the middle of the page, but it does not jump out any more than any of the others.  The others are not significantly more or less interesting or valuable.  I randomly stopped on this one, and it happened to describe exactly what I was doing.

So apparently randomly reading portions of papers and emails is closer to the norm than I thought.