The 6 Principles for Writing Messages People Won't Swipe Away
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Summary
Todd Rogers is a behavioral scientist, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Writing for Busy Readers: How to Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. In this episode, he explains the four-stage process people use in deciding whether to engage with your writing, whether in a personal or business context, and how influencing these factors not only comes down to the style of your writing but its overall design.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Think of all the texts, emails, and social media posts you're inundated with each day.
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Sometimes you read them and sometimes you swipe them away, telling yourself, perhaps
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not so honestly, that you'll revisit them later.
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If you're the center of such missives and memos or the creator of content, you hope
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the recipient has the first response, that, instead of deep-sixing your message, they
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How do you increase the odds of that happening?
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Rather than just guessing at the answer, Todd Rogers has done empirical experiments to discover
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Todd is a behavioral scientist, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School,
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and the author of Writing for Busy Readers, Communicate More Effectively in the Real World.
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Today on the show, Todd explains the four-stage process people use in deciding whether to engage
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with your writing, whether in a personal or business context, and how influencing these
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factors not only comes down to the style of your writing, but its overall design.
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Todd offers tips to improve both areas so that you can effectively capture people's attention.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash busyreaders.
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So you are a professor of public policy, and you recently co-authored a book about how to
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What's the connection between researching and writing about public policy and writing for
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I've never been asked to actually defend why this is public policy.
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I guess it starts with, I spent a decade working on how do we communicate to busy voters, trying
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to mobilize voters to participate in elections, and then a decade working on how do we communicate
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with busy families from schools to get kids to go to school and kids do better.
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And then five or six years before Jessica and I wrote this book, working with leaders across
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industries on how do we communicate to our employees, stakeholders, customers, constituents.
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And yeah, so I guess the common thread is across all these categories, across every domain of
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And if we want to be effective at doing it, we have to understand that our readers are busy
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and we should write in a way that makes it easy for them.
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So with public policy, you're trying to get people to do things, but in order for them to
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do the thing that you want them to do, you have to communicate that to them.
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I describe it as stage zero of every intervention we deliver is do we capture people's attention
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long enough to deliver whatever we're trying to communicate?
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So if we are trying to have people sign up for a program or comply with the law or show up
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to court on a specific court date, we need to make sure we are communicating to them effectively.
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So you start off the book defining what effective communication is, what effective writing is,
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and you've developed this definition based on research as well as your own experience as a
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So it's funny, we talk about writing as if we are teaching writers, but the entire question
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of effectiveness is do we succeed in communicating some thought from our head into the head of
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And so when we talk about this work, we're like, okay, imagine you own a radical different
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It's not enough to have everything in there and then shift the responsibility of the reader.
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Imagine if it was always your fault if the reader did not read what you gave them.
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If it was always your fault, and so it's your responsibility to make sure they read it and
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All you control is what you put in front of them.
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Effective writing is writing that we succeed in delivering the key content into someone
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And then at the beginning, I loved how you applied the things you write about in this
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And you lay out these sort of bullet points of what you found to be effective writing.
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Things like effective writing has a well-defined purpose.
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It says, effective writing helps the writer as well as the reader.
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How does effective writing help the writer as well as the reader?
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Writing often helps us clarify our own thinking.
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And I think we conflate that with the other use of writing, which is getting an idea from
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And often we write our first draft, and then at the end, it was clear what we think that
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Stage two is then we need to actually make it as easy for the reader as possible.
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The way it makes it easier for the writer, writing effectively helps writers because,
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one, it helps us achieve our goals, which is Jessica and my objective with this book.
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Helping writers be more effective in achieving their goals.
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But it also, and we've all experienced this, the haranguing or harassment of people who haven't
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Ineffective writing becomes a huge burden on the writer because people aren't showing up.
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So writing effectively helps writers because it saves us all the follow-up and all the hassle
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that we are experiencing as a part of hassling other people to respond to us.
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Another point you make, effective writing is not the same as beautiful writing.
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K through 12, K through college, we are taught these ideals of what good writing looks like,
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what beautiful sentences are, and using advanced vocabulary to be more precise.
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And I think that's a critical stage on the road to becoming an effective person.
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But there's a totally different project, which is not meeting some ideal, but actually
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communicating in the world to people who are not paid to read your writing.
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And people who are, most of the time, trying to move on as quickly as possible.
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Like their goal is to hit delete or hit next as quickly as possible, often without even
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And so it's like effective writing is writing for those people, not for people who are paid
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Like you might use some flowery language in a novel because that's what you're trying to,
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It's basically beautiful writing and effective writing have two different goals.
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We think of effective writing as being about professional, practical writing, where you're
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texting a friend, or you're writing a web content, or you're writing an email to a coworker.
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All of it is like, it is not, you know, we're not trying to layer in a third level of meaning
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with close reading about what adjective we used.
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We're actually just trying to practically communicate something.
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So effective writing is about getting stuff done.
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And you guys aren't arguing in this book that we need to, you know, do sort of like
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an Orwellian newspeak where all of our writing becomes effective writing.
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There's still a place for Tolstoy in writing like that.
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It's just that you're focused on how can we write so people get stuff done?
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I mean, we probably could have incorporated that into the title.
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You read the New Yorker or Tolstoy because you are reading it recreationally to entertain
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And that is different than working your way through your text messages or your inbox.
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As a guy who's on public policy, what have the consequences been of ineffective writing,
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You go across any domain for, it could be ineffective.
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Let's say you're a government and you're communicating to people who are delinquent
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You're mailing them and they're not reading it.
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There's all these studies on people are released from arrest and they are given court summons.
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And if it is written in a way that is easy to read, they're way more likely to actually
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show up to court and not have bench warrants issued for their arrest or signage in your public
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park asking you to pick up your dog's poop written in pretty incomprehensible ways.
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Personally, like I have started two organizations.
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One is the hub in Washington, D.C. of using behavioral science and behavior change on public
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political communications and effective political communications, whether it's get out the vote
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or fundraising or volunteer recruitment or persuasion.
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Another is a company that works with K-12 school districts and communicating to families effectively
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And so writing in a way that makes it hard to understand or just writing the way we sometimes
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do can undermine these important goals that organizations, campaigns, schools, companies
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have, which is trying to achieve some goal that is good for both the person who's reading
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And I'm sure everyone's seen examples of the bad consequences of ineffective writing at their
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You know, the company sends out a memo trying to get you to do something, but it's written
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in this convoluted way or there's just too much going on in the memo that there's hardly
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Yeah, there's I mean, there's some great examples.
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It is a an organization that gives an award every year called the WTF Award for just the
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And the sign, a real sign, getting people to pick up their dog's poop was persons shall
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I am certain that that was an ineffective sign and that 90 percent of people didn't read it
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and understand that the goal was to scoop your pet's poop.
0.63
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So before you start writing, the thing you say we need to do first is get inside your
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What do people need to understand about readers today so they understand like how a reader
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decides whether or not they're going to read something, whether they're going to read
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I think the TLDR of the whole thing, the too long didn't read of the whole book or of this
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entire project that we're doing is everyone is skimming everything, right?
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No one is spending as much time reading as we are writing and thinking about it.
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And so we need to write in a way that accommodates the reality that everyone's skimming.
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So you get inside their head and know that they are super busy and they have a long list
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of things to do and a lot of things they'd rather do than read whatever you're sending
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We've run these experiments where even text messages, writing them so they're easier to
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read makes people more likely to understand and respond to them.
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So if you're going to get in the reader's head, it all starts with everyone's busy and
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And rarely do people care as much about what we're writing as we do.
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And I love this too, you lay out a four-stage process that readers go through and when
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they're deciding whether they're going to engage with a piece of text.
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And this is whether it's an email, a text, a Slack message, a social media post.
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The first part is you have to decide whether you're going to engage with it at all.
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So you just look at the thing and you kind of skim it and you're like, well, I'm not even
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Second is if you decide to engage, you must decide when to engage.
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It's a combination of the first and second, of the second and third, which is the first
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most is the, I think the most important and kind of the most subtle, but everyone will
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relate to, which is if you have a long thing in front of you and a short thing in front
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of you, which you're going to do first, almost everyone is going to do the short, easy thing
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And so you look at it, it's a wall of words and we call that deterrence.
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And that's like, I think that everyone should relate to you.
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Open something, even a text message, I can't deal with that right now.
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Or you go to a webpage and it's a long wall of words.
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The second and third are basically like, okay, so do I engage with it now or later?
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And whenever I engage with it, how deeply do I read it?
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And I assume we actually have lots of evidence.
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What happens is the more difficult it is to read, the more you just sort of dart around,
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bounce around, see if you get the gist and eventually give up and move on.
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And the fourth one is deciding whether to respond or not if you're asking for some kind
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And the easier the response, the more likely people are to do it.
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Just like the shorter the message, someone's more likely to read that than a long one.
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If it looks like it's going to require a lot of research or it's unclear what the question
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is, all these things make it just less likely people deal with it at all, but definitely less
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Okay, so let's talk about what we can do as writers to increase the odds that someone
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will want to engage with whatever we're throwing at them.
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They'll want to maybe act on it faster, sooner rather than later, and engage with all of it
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and as well as respond, get more response so we can get stuff done.
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And you and your co-author lay out six principles that writers can use to make sure that their
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The first principle, and you kind of referred to it just a minute ago, less is more.
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So how does more often get in the way of your readers engaging with your text?
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You could probably go back to, there's a quote that every clever person who's ever been alive
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has been credited with this quote, which is, I would have written you a shorter letter
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And what I love about that is it is worthy of apology.
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I have wronged you by giving you this longer than it needed to be text.
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Both of those are sort of central to this less is more idea.
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And the idea is, and we've run randomized experiments, lots of them, where the more sentences you
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add, the more ideas you add, just the longer it is, the less likely people are to read and
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Whether it's soliciting a response, getting people to fill out a survey, getting people
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to, we worked with the, I don't know if we named the party, but one of the big political
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parties, Democrat or Republican, on a big fundraising email with 700,000 donors and arbitrarily deleted
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So we cut it in half by making it incoherent and still increase donations.
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We've done lots of versions of this, but the idea is just, you need to know there's a trade
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The more you add, the less likely someone is to read, understand and respond.
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And the optimal length and content is not nothing or one sentence.
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You just need to know the more you add, the less effective it'll be, but you got to make
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So you lay out some rules to apply this less is more.
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And I mean, if you went to college or even high school, they taught, you know, this whole
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elements of style, just eliminate, and that was one of the rules, eliminate needless words.
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You know, I've everyone seen these wordy phrases for the reason that instead of saying that
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to say, because, you know, in order to say to just to whether or not, well, just whether
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I mean, so just things like that can go a long way.
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So we're talking about maybe it's a memo or an email you're trying to write.
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Oftentimes you want to try to cram as many things as you can in that piece of text.
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But what your research shows is like the fewer, the better.
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The fewer ideas you have in your email or memo, the more likely people are going to read
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I mean, it's hard for people because it requires judgment and prioritizing.
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Like, what's the most important thing I'm saying here?
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And it would be good for you to know this, but it's not necessary.
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Like, if it's a web page, you could have a link to the more content.
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Or if it's an email, you could have it below the sign-off or as an attachment.
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You can keep the detail, but you just need the core thing to be the core thing.
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And what we have is all this experimental evidence showing that when you dilute it with
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more content, you just are less likely to achieve your goal.
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And it just requires judgments and trade-offs the whole way.
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Could be a text to get together with some friends for dinner.
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The original one is, I'm looking forward to our 6.30 dinner tonight.
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Let's eat at Tina's Italian restaurant at 651 Ocean Drive.
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Let's meet at my place 15 minutes early, and we'll walk from there.
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Sam and Joey are going to join us for dinner, too.
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Man, if I got that text, I'd be like, oh, geez, I'm going to just have to look at this later.
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But, you know, you could have just said, hey, we're having dinner.
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It's just, and if you're aware that there's a tradeoff, then you have to treat it differently.
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Since writing the book, I've worked with a guy who's in the CIA who writes intelligence
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assessments in this group, this intelligence group.
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Because if I write 35 pages, they're going to think I didn't do my job because the norm
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And so I actually love that because the answer is you can't.
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And what your audience expects, it has to look like what your audience expects.
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I mean, Jessica and I wrote a 207-page book where one of the principles is write less.
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If you have a book, expect the book to look like a book.
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And so you have an audience that has norms and expectations.
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But then within those constraints, the easier you make it for them, the better.
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And so with a text message, I don't think anyone cares whether you are interested in
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They're just like, when do I show up and who's going to be there?
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How do we typically make reading more difficult for our audience?
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We write in grammatically correct, complicated ways.
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And so whether it is a long sentence or using unfamiliar, uncommon words or writing in a grammatically
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complicated way, it just makes it more cognitively taxing.
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So a different way of thinking about all this in length and also writing style is just how
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The easier it is, the more likely people will be to do it.
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So even if they're going to work their way through it, it's just unkind to write in a
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We ran one experiment with Vice President Harris when she was the Attorney General of California
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where, and I mean, I don't know, the listeners are not, I hope no one is writing like this,
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but the California state legislature required that schools send families letters when their
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And it starts with California education code section 48 to 60 provides that a pupil child
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I mean, it's not even written for humans and it's like being sent to hundreds of thousands
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So the idea is we just add a round of editing where we just ask, how do I make it just easier
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Even if we are correct, complete and grammatically accurate, we just make it easier.
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So you apply some rules, use short and common words.
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Don't use a $5 word when a 50 cent word will do.
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So instead of saying acquiesce, you can just say agree.
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You can save the $50 words for your New Yorker article you're writing for yourself.
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So this is, you're not going to do, you know, clauses and using semicolons and et cetera.
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So, you know, just got to edit, edit, edit, edit until you can get it down.
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Yeah, that's the, that's the idea, but no simpler than it needs to be, right?
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So you give an example of a hard to read complex sentence and then editing it.
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Often crafted from insidiously complicated language designed to abstract contentious details.
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Ballot measures are propagated as a tool of direct democracy in 24 states and Washington,
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So yeah, grammatically correct, but that was hard to read.
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Ballot measures are used as a tool of direct democracy in 24 states and Washington, DC.
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They're often written with deceptively complex language designed to hide controversial details.
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:21:36.400
So we're just going to use fewer words, write shorter sentences, and make sure your sentences
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aren't hard to read with those parentheticals and semicolons and references back to things
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Third principle is designed for easy navigation.
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Now, I'm sure a lot of people are listening to this.
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They probably learned in high school or in college, you know, some ideas or some rules about being
00:22:01.420
We've all probably read elements of style and that's one of the rules, but I don't remember
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Well, actually I was taught this in law school, but I wasn't taught this in undergrad or high
00:22:10.520
school is thinking about the design of your writing so that it's easy to read.
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How can we lay out our writing so that it's easier to navigate?
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This is, I like all of them equally, but I like this and less is more the most.
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But the idea is it's not even about writing, but realizing that people are going to look
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Remember that stage of deterrence or once they're reading, they're just going to dart around and
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see if they can get something out of it before they give up.
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And one metaphor, or at least a framework we use for thinking about it is that people
00:22:50.680
may allocate like a fixed budget of time to reading your thing.
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And so then the question is just how, how do you make it easier for them to get what
00:23:04.500
And when we actually do eye tracking, you see people jump around and read the headings
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Sometimes they just go first line, second line, but that's when they're anticipating reading
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But often they'll just dart around and figure out what's in here.
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And we've actually run experiments where when you add headings in newsletters, you double
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the likelihood that people will read past the second paragraph and use anything in it past
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The other one that people really like and I really like, and I don't know if you're a
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veteran or how many of your listeners are veterans, but I work with a lot of active
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duty people in different branches of the military.
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One thing that they have in the US, started in the US Army and it's spread across the
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militaries around the world is a thing called bluff, bottom line up front, B-L-U-F, bluff,
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And it is a rule in the US Army, a rule that anything written to anybody, the first line
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So there's no long introduction, an enlisted person writing to a general.
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And it makes it so much easier for readers and writers to know where's the key info,
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where do I put the key info, where do I find the key info.
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But it especially helps people who are lower status, like an enlisted person writing to
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a general might have to say, in the absence of that rule, like, we ran into each other
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We laughed about how the Philadelphia Eagles are going to win the Super Bowl this year.
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And so instead of the whole throat clearing, which would decrease the likelihood we get
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read at all, now they have this rule that doesn't work everywhere.
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But having this rule in that environment and with that organization makes it just easier
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And so another way to design for navigation is to have this kind of structure so it's
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easy to pull the key info out and jump around, but also, when possible, make the bottom line
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So yeah, when you write an email, for example, just right at the very top, you don't have
00:25:01.800
Maybe, but it doesn't work every, like, it just depends on the expectations and norms
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I still have a hope you're well or good talking to you the other day.
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Like, I'll write my, like, all business part and then I'll add some humanity to it because
00:25:20.420
And so, but, but like within organizations, when we talk, like the next step that Jessica
00:25:25.460
and I are thinking and working on is like, so, okay, so you've become more effective
00:25:33.160
And it starts with just being intentional and explicit.
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Instead of just letting these norms evolve without intention or guidance, let's be intentional
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Like the U S army decided bluff so we can all be on the same page.
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When you write a memo, you break things up in headings so that the partner that you wrote
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the memo for, it can just glance at it and get to the information they might be particularly
00:26:02.680
Another thing for easy navigation, add bullet points, like using bullet points can help out
00:26:07.740
a lot, especially if you've got more than two ideas or two requests in your communication.
00:26:14.500
Yeah, there's a subtle one on the bullet points too, where, which I think you were pointing
00:26:18.820
to is that if, if the bullet is kind of long, a skimmer still has to read the bullet to figure
00:26:25.940
And so one of the things that we have found is putting a title to the bullet, which may
00:26:32.200
We're just saying add a three word title, which is extra words, makes it easier for a
00:26:36.660
skimmer to know whether they should bother engaging with this bullet or whether they are
00:26:40.920
And so it's a, you know, a subtle thing, but the goal is just making it as easy for your
00:26:46.600
reader to move on and get the key info that you want them to get.
00:26:50.560
And then when we start talking about design, you can see that you want it to be aesthetically
00:26:57.100
And so you want the headings and titles to always look the same and things like that.
00:27:01.400
Another rule you can apply for easy navigation, order your ideas by priority.
00:27:07.560
But if you have more than one idea, like put the stuff that you care about the most right
00:27:11.200
at the top, because the person's going to read that far and then they're going to start
00:27:19.300
And you, and if they are going to jump around, you want to make it easy for them to jump around,
00:27:22.160
which is why, like you said, you like to space it out, put bullets or things just making
00:27:27.680
And then another rule, you know, consider using visuals, like don't be afraid to put pictures
00:27:32.180
If that picture or visual can convey the message, what you're trying to convey more efficiently.
00:27:38.720
A colleague of mine and friend and mentor, Nancy Gibbs used to be the editor of time magazine.
00:27:43.320
And I was really surprised to hear her say that a common feedback she would give to her
00:27:55.400
And she said that that was a common challenge for writers is like, is there an easier way to
00:28:01.760
Like, can it be a diagram instead of a full paragraph or two?
00:28:05.700
And so the thing about designing for easy navigation that takes time on your part as a writer,
00:28:11.420
because it's easy just to just crank out just a big block of text, maybe put a few paragraphs
00:28:16.720
here and there, but thinking about headings, thinking about what could be bolded, thinking
00:28:21.660
about, you know, the bluff, that's going to take a bit more time than just cranking that
00:28:29.380
You got to, you have to really be thoughtful about this.
00:28:31.460
So, but the payoff is in the end, you invest that time up front.
00:28:35.140
So you save yourself some time and frustration on the backend.
00:28:39.680
And what's, if it's really important for you, you want to make it easy for the reader because
00:28:45.320
It's also this kindness that I also think it's kind of a subtle implication of all of it
00:28:50.460
is that it's just nicer to your reader to make it easy in that way.
00:28:55.800
So, uh, the fourth principle is use enough formatting, but no more.
00:29:00.420
So I think one thing people do to help ensure that certain ideas stand out, they'll use things
00:29:05.940
like bold or underlines or all caps in a text message.
00:29:10.600
How do people mess up formatting though, when they're trying to get their points across to
00:29:16.860
This has been the bigger surprise of writing this book for me.
00:29:22.000
The biggest surprise has been people being really excited because they say, this has
00:29:29.800
And I have been saying, we need to write in a way that makes it easier.
00:29:32.780
And people are like, this is just your taste and just your preference.
00:29:37.120
And now we bring to it all these randomized experiments and a lot of evidence from different
00:29:42.760
And it's now actually a question of like scientific effectiveness.
00:29:45.600
The other surprise has been when people email me one, there's a lot of anxiety.
00:29:51.780
I think that I'm going to be judgmental and anyone who's going to email me, you do not
00:29:55.240
It turns out writing, reading and communicating are all hard.
00:29:59.360
But the second thing is when I started saying use enough highlighting, but no more, it leads
00:30:04.420
to people using, you know, different font colors, underlying bold highlight italics, all
00:30:11.800
It was only eight sentences and there are six different kinds of stylistic formatting
00:30:20.620
And the irony is that that actually is worse than nothing because it makes it harder for
00:30:25.400
the reader to figure out what you think as the writer is the most important thing.
00:30:29.900
Because if you only format, let's say you bold one sentence, it is unambiguous to the
00:30:37.820
But if you do lots of different things, the six of the eight sentences, I have no idea
00:30:42.760
as a reader what you think is most important and what any of the formatting even means.
00:30:47.380
So using a formatting in surveys and experiments, we've seen that people jump to bold, underlined
00:30:53.900
They jump to that and they think the writer is saying to them, this is the most important
00:31:01.320
It also licenses readers to not read anything else because they've gotten the key info and
00:31:06.540
So you've got to use it carefully because it gets people to read that and also crowds
00:31:14.900
It just confuses readers about what any of it means.
00:31:18.160
So bolding, underlining, highlighting, it's effective in getting the reader to think, here's
00:31:24.140
what the writer thinks is important and to put their focus on that if that's what you
00:31:31.120
Any formatting things that you see in online writing that aren't effective?
00:31:34.880
I don't like how links all get font color change and underlined because you actually,
00:31:41.480
there is eye tracking research showing that people jump to that.
00:31:48.220
And so there's this tension, there's this norm.
00:31:50.780
Everyone knows that's what a link is, but it also kind of undermines the speed of consuming
00:31:58.180
And so I actually, my, the trade-off for me on that is like, we want to minimize the
00:32:02.180
number of words that are linked if you can, while still accurately describing whatever
00:32:07.660
That's sort of a small point, but one that aesthetically, I don't think we have a good
00:32:15.780
You don't have to use all the formatting options.
00:32:21.260
And again, it's going to, the formatting use is going to vary by context.
00:32:24.700
Maybe in your organization, you have a rule or a norm that you use in regards to formatting
00:32:34.280
The fifth principle is tell readers why they should care.
00:32:38.280
And this is all about making sure that the reader actually engages with your content.
00:32:42.660
So what can we do to show the reader, like you should care about this and engage with this
00:32:51.260
Yeah, I, the way we thought about this is the obvious way to get a reader to read something
00:32:56.260
is to write about something they care about, but we take it as given the writer has the
00:33:01.560
thing they want to write about and the thing they're trying to communicate.
00:33:04.240
And it doesn't really matter from the writer's objectives, whether this is the most interesting
00:33:10.140
So we take as a given, you have your goal, your goal as a writer within that set of ideas
00:33:17.220
All we're saying is you may as well emphasize the part of the things you're going to say
00:33:24.180
So we report this experiment with Rock the Vote, which is a, like a voter registration
00:33:30.020
organization that tries to target young people.
00:33:32.900
And they were sending an email out to potential volunteers saying, will you volunteer to work
00:33:42.100
And in one condition, the subject line was volunteer with Rock the Vote.
00:33:46.180
And in the other condition, it was attend concerts for free.
00:33:50.220
Maybe it was like volunteer and attend concerts for free.
00:33:53.240
And so the subject line there is like drawing attention.
00:33:57.200
You're going to volunteer at a concert and you're going to register voters.
00:34:00.120
But we may as well emphasize the thing that people will value out of that set.
00:34:03.280
And so they ended up four X more effective, four times more effective by just making the
00:34:08.960
subject line focus within the set of ideas they're going to say in the message on the
00:34:13.660
thing they think the recipient might care the most about.
00:34:15.380
So that principle is just emphasize what the reader might care about within the bounds
00:34:20.520
We're not saying you need to say something different.
00:34:22.300
We're just saying you may as well focus on the thing they may care about.
00:34:29.500
They say, Hey, this is why, you know, start off this, like in the subject line, here's
00:34:33.220
why you should care about this and then put all the other information after that.
00:34:37.740
And then another rule that you have for that, for tell the readers why they should care is
00:34:44.440
This is important because sometimes you send out a message and it's only going to a certain
00:34:50.620
And if you make it too broad, you might end up causing the group of people you're trying
00:34:55.200
to communicate to just to ignore it completely.
00:34:57.380
Yeah, it's, it's at minimum, it's kind to your reader to let them loose.
00:35:05.240
But also in the intermediate term, as you communicate more, if you let people go when it's not relevant
00:35:11.480
to them, they're going to be more likely to attend when it is relevant to them.
00:35:15.100
You gave the example, like let's say you have a grocery store and there's been a recall
00:35:20.920
You know, the grocery store might put up a sign noticed important product safety recall
00:35:26.000
Well, you know, if someone sees that, it's like, well, I don't know, maybe I, is it the
00:35:33.300
And then you said, if you want to have a reader's perspective, the top line of that notice
00:35:37.380
should say, if you bought soup X, Y, Z in June, it has been recalled.
00:35:41.860
And so like, oh, immediately the person seen that it's like, well, did I buy that soup in
00:35:46.720
And then they can make that decision whether they need to engage with it or not.
00:35:50.740
Well, Brett, also, I applaud you for getting, these are deep tracks in the book.
00:36:06.920
But if you want the details on any topic, you can dive deep in it.
00:36:09.920
So the sixth principle is make responding easy, you know, not all communications require
00:36:16.320
response, but a lot of the communications that we put out there to get stuff done, they
00:36:24.660
I know that there are other that your listeners and you follow other behavioral scientists like
00:36:30.540
behavioral economists or social psychologists who work on behavior change, which is basically
00:36:34.540
what my research has been on for the last 25 years.
00:36:37.240
And all of that is this, which is the takeaway is if you want someone to do something, we
00:36:44.880
And so whether that means reducing the number of steps required to take the action or providing
00:36:50.760
checklists or pre-populating forms, or even like here's something completely basic that
00:36:56.280
we've all had, which is let's schedule a meeting.
00:36:59.700
These six times work for me, which work for you?
00:37:02.260
And then if you reply in a paragraph, well, I can do the first time, but I'd have to move a
00:37:08.260
The second time is better for me, but the third doesn't work.
00:37:12.160
And the fourth could work if nothing else works.
00:37:15.880
Like the amount of effort required to decipher which of the times you're proposing actually
00:37:21.400
work is, you know, you're adding 35, 40 seconds to the next person to figure it out.
00:37:27.280
If we actually wanted everyone to respond, you say of those times, these two work for me,
00:37:32.600
Nobody cares whether it means you have to move a meeting.
00:37:34.520
So the idea is if it's important to you that someone get back to you, you want to make
00:37:40.480
If it's important for us, we want to make it easy for them.
00:37:42.820
I'll often ask students, imagine you have a task that will take five minutes and a task
00:37:50.240
Both of them are on your to-do list and you plan to do both eventually.
00:37:54.640
Almost everybody's going to do the 30 second task first.
00:37:57.320
And so the idea is you just want to make it easy, as easy as possible.
00:38:00.700
And so that means maybe you have to do some decision structuring for the person.
00:38:06.020
Like here, I need you to make this decision, just this one decision.
00:38:09.820
And then after that, you can maybe follow up if you need to make other decisions.
00:38:12.800
But like, just pick like one thing you want them to respond to.
00:38:17.340
Like one in the less is more, there's fewer requests.
00:38:20.780
If you ask someone to do two things, you are less likely to get them to do any one of them
00:38:25.920
The idea is we've got to prioritize, we have our goals, and we need to write in a way that
00:38:30.560
makes it easy for the reader to help us achieve our goals.
00:38:36.120
Like you're saying, if I asked you, what do you think versus I'm going to submit this,
00:38:44.920
Like they end up being, it's much easier to say, yes, agree, submit, than an open-ended,
00:38:51.800
And so it's just my prediction and some of the evidence is, all the evidence is consistent
00:38:56.420
with people are more likely to respond and more likely to respond sooner when it's a
00:39:03.500
Another rule you have in this make responding easy is organizing key information that's needed
00:39:09.720
So let's say you make a request for something at your work or something, but then in order
00:39:15.760
for the reader to answer that, they have to start troweling through all this information
00:39:21.140
or kind of doing this scavenger hunt to even start putting together a response.
00:39:26.700
Well, if that's the case, they're going to drag their feet on that or they're going to
00:39:31.600
Instead, if there's an answer you need right away, provide the reader with as much information
00:39:37.160
as possible that they need in that communication so they can give you the response you need.
00:39:43.060
And I think if people had those in mind as they wrote, they'd get a lot more done with
00:39:47.920
At the end of the book, beyond these six principles, you talk about some other ideas that you've
00:39:52.780
seen in your research and your own personal experience when it comes to communicating and
00:39:56.700
getting people to respond to your writing and getting stuff done with writing.
00:40:01.080
And one topic you talk about is frequency of communicating.
00:40:05.340
This is something I struggle with when it comes to communication in my business or in organizations
00:40:11.960
that I belong to because I worry about communicating too much because I don't want to bug people.
00:40:18.380
But something I've noticed is that when I do communicate more, I get more responses.
00:40:22.940
I get more people showing up for things or doing things.
00:40:27.480
How often should I hit people with the same information so that it's effective?
00:40:35.800
Just like there's not a single stable answer for when should you communicate because the
00:40:41.540
If the answer is Thursday at 3 p.m., everyone is going to communicate Thursday at 3 p.m.,
00:40:50.940
Similarly, for frequency of communication, I think there isn't a good answer.
00:40:54.960
But my first pass at it is if you think that your reader wants your communication and values
00:41:02.640
it, like your newsletter, if you think that they really want it, then you want to be consistent
00:41:06.760
so they know when to expect it and have it look the same so they can recognize quickly
00:41:12.420
In the intermediate term, if we communicate all the time, we will decrease people's likelihood
00:41:18.340
that they associate us with something they should read.
00:41:20.840
And they will start to view us as a pest and they will unsubscribe.
00:41:25.280
And so I know there are a lot of organizations that have big lists.
00:41:28.360
The balance that we're always talking about is you can increase donation, for example, by
00:41:37.740
And so what's the two, three-year horizon consequence is you may end up being worse off for having
00:41:42.840
gotten more donations in this week by sending more messages.
00:41:46.280
But in the intermediate horizon, you're worse off.
00:41:54.580
No, so it sounds like it's like the killing the goose that lays the golden egg problem.
00:41:58.960
You can extract a lot of value by doing a lot of frequency in the short term, but in the
00:42:03.720
long term, you end up killing the thing that provides you value.
00:42:07.260
So when it comes to, let's say you belong to, I don't know, like a sports league or a church
00:42:16.300
And that's the thing where I've found that more frequent communication helps up to a point.
00:42:21.780
You can't just do one and expect to get a response because people might just miss that
00:42:26.420
first email or they read it and then they forgot about it.
00:42:31.060
And then the event comes up two weeks later and they're like, I didn't know about it.
00:42:36.660
So I think something like that, I need one email, maybe two weeks out and then, you know,
00:42:43.340
maybe a week out, you send a reminder and then like two days before you send a final
00:42:49.340
I mean, if you did a reminder every single day, people are just going to tune you out.
00:42:52.880
I think there's consistency in that too, Brett, where it's like, I'm on a board where they
00:42:58.320
send materials out a week in advance and then they send them the night before again.
00:43:01.820
And so I know two weeks in advance, I don't need to deal with this because I know it's
00:43:08.700
And so if they stopped doing that and they just did it occasionally, I think I and the
00:43:12.880
other members would all be, you know, less prepared because we've come to expect that,
00:43:17.420
oh, this is just the forewarning before the real one.
00:43:20.900
I think consistency is probably key there because people start to associate you with a pattern.
00:43:25.040
But I also think, yeah, frequency can be a tool to help a harried reader because people
00:43:31.820
are just getting inundated with stuff and they're going to miss things.
00:43:34.640
This can even happen with your friends with text messages, right?
00:43:36.760
You send a friend a text and you don't hear back from them and you think, oh man, they
00:43:43.720
And so no, if their text inbox is anything like yours, it's just getting inundated with,
00:43:48.460
you know, two-factor authentications, reminders about their kid's doctor's appointment.
00:43:52.340
So maybe the friendly thing to do would be, hey, follow up two days later if they haven't
00:43:59.840
So I think with frequency, yeah, there's a balance, but I think maybe don't be afraid
00:44:04.740
of nudging more than you think because you're probably not actually nudging because the
00:44:08.780
people probably didn't see your initial message anyways.
00:44:13.840
I also think when you talk about a friend or a coworker with whom you communicate a lot,
00:44:17.840
I do think the answer, this is probably the answer for most questions, is to communicate
00:44:22.960
better and actually have a discussion about it.
00:44:30.760
Some people will view you pinging them again as like, yeah, man, I read it.
00:44:40.180
And so a different way, if this is someone you communicate with a lot, is to just ask,
00:44:44.660
would it be useful if I send follow-ups or not?
00:44:48.640
I actually have all sorts of people that they have incredibly varied preferences.
00:44:54.000
And for people I communicate with a lot, I actually have started to learn what they are
00:44:58.700
I'm curious, are there any AI tools that you're seeing out there that are helping
00:45:05.980
Are you setting me up for, did I show you mine?
00:45:10.560
So early on, we trained GPT-4 or GPT-3-5 and then now GPT-4-0, the OpenAI's latest LLM.
00:45:19.340
On the, with your listeners in the show notes, I hope you'll share the checklist.
00:45:23.120
There's a one-page checklist for how to write for busy readers.
00:45:27.180
And we trained the LL, large language model on these principles.
00:45:32.240
And then we fed it what's called few-shot learning, just three pre-post examples of emails, an
00:45:39.060
original and an edited, original edit, original edit.
00:45:41.720
It's incredible at editing emails so that they are skimmable.
00:45:49.020
And like, I get emails all the time from people saying that they, they put any important message
00:46:00.320
Like the large language models you could think of as they learn inductively, they consume
00:46:06.200
And then they learn, they infer rules and predictions.
00:46:12.820
We're like, look, there are these six principles.
00:46:14.380
We should edit through the lens of these principles because this is actually what the science suggests
00:46:23.100
And then it can revise in accordance, like with, and we shouldn't use words like in accordance,
00:46:28.740
we shouldn't use just, it, it, it writes in ways that are consistent with that.
00:46:33.240
So it writingforbusyreaders.com, but I love it.
00:46:36.360
We're trying to get it internalized by the other big, large language model, especially
00:46:43.200
Well, Todd, this has been a great conversation.
00:46:44.460
Where can people go to learn more about the book?
00:46:48.240
Writingforbusyreaders.com, writingforbusyreaders.com.
00:46:51.060
And the too long didn't read of this whole thing.
00:46:53.580
If you made it to the end and you don't have the big takeaway, the big takeaway is we should
00:46:57.240
add a round of editing to everything we write where we ask ourselves, how do I make it easier
00:47:05.640
Because the easier it is for the reader, the more effective we are at achieving our
00:47:15.700
He's the author of the book, Writing for Busy Readers.
00:47:17.680
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:47:19.920
You can find more information about the book at the website, writingforbusyreaders.com.
00:47:23.280
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash busyreaders, where we find links to resources
00:47:36.760
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:47:39.460
Make sure to check out our website at artofmanly.com where you find our podcast archives, as well
00:47:43.320
as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything
00:47:47.020
And if you haven't done this already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to zoom
00:47:53.420
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00:47:56.780
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00:48:00.020
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