Podcast #1,049: The 6 Principles for Writing Messages People Won’t Swipe Away

The Art of Manliness

Think of all the texts, emails, and social media posts you’re inundated with each day. Sometimes you read them, and sometimes you swipe them away, telling yourself, perhaps not so honestly, that you’ll revisit them later.

If you’re the sender of such missives and memos or the creator of content, you hope the recipient has the first response, that, instead of deep-sixing your message, they take the time to engage and take action on it.

How do you increase the odds of that happening? Rather than just guessing at the answer, Todd Rogers has done empirical experiments to discover it. Todd is a behavioral scientist, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. Today on the show, Todd 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. Todd offers tips to improve both areas, so that you can effectively capture people’s attention.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #971: The 5 Factors for Crafting Simple (Read: Effective!) Messages
• AoM Podcast #666: The Power of Brevity in a Noisy World
• AoM Podcast #580: Why People Do (Or Don’t) Listen to You

Connect With Todd Rogers

• Todd on X
• Todd’s faculty page
• Writing for Busy Readers website

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Think of all the texts, emails, and social media posts you’re inundated with each day. Sometimes you read them and sometimes you swipe them away, telling yourself, perhaps not so honestly, that you’ll revisit them later. If you’re the sender of such missives and memos or the creator of content, you hope the recipient has the first response. That instead of deep six-ing your message, they take the time to engage and take action on it. How do you increase the odds of that happening? Rather than just guessing at the answer? Todd Rogers has done empirical experiments to discover it. Todd is a behavioral scientist, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Writing for Busy Readers, Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. Today on the show, Todd 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. Todd offers tips to improve both areas so that you can effectively capture people’s attention. At the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/busyreaders.

All right. Todd Rogers, welcome to the show.

Todd Rogers: Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a professor of public policy and you recently co-authored a book about how to write for busy readers. What’s the connection between researching and writing about public policy and writing for harried people living in the TikTok age?

Todd Rogers: I’ve never been asked to actually defend why this is public policy. I guess it starts with I spent a decade working on how do we communicate to busy voters trying to mobilize voters to participate in elections, and then a decade working on how do we communicate with busy families from schools to get kids to go to school and kids to do better. And then five or six years before Jessica and I wrote this book, working with leaders across industries on how do we communicate to our employees, stakeholders, customers, constituents, and yeah, so I guess the common thread is across all these categories, across every domain of life, we are communicating to busy people. And if we wanna be effective at doing it, we have to understand that our readers are busy and we should write in a way that makes it easy for them.

Brett McKay: Yeah. With public policy, you’re trying to get people to do things, but in order for them to do the thing that you want them to do, you have to communicate that to them?

Todd Rogers: Yeah. I describe it as stage zero of every intervention we deliver. Is do we capture people’s attention long enough to deliver whatever we’re trying to communicate? So yeah. So if we are trying to have people sign up for a program or, you know, comply with the law or show up to court on a specific court date, we need to make sure we are communicating to them effectively.

Brett McKay: So you start off the book defining what effective communication is, what effective writing is, and you’ve developed this definition based on research as well as your own experience as a reader and writer. So what makes writing effective?

Todd Rogers: I think we probably start with the reader. So it’s funny, we talk about writing as if we are teaching writers, but the entire question of effectiveness is, do we succeed in communicating some thought from our head into the head of a reader? And so when we talk about this work, we’re like, okay, imagine you own a radical different take on writing. It’s not enough to have everything in there and then shift the responsibility to the reader. Imagine if it was always your fault if the reader did not read what you gave them. If it was always your fault, and so it’s your responsibility to make sure they read it and you don’t control their lives. All you control is what you put in front of them. Then just, it takes a whole new orientation. Effective writing is writing that we succeed in delivering the key content into someone else’s head at their leisure.

Brett McKay: And then at the beginning, I loved how you applied the things you write about in this book, in your book, and you lay out these sort of bullet points of what you found to be effective writing. Things like effective writing has a well-defined purpose. There’s a reason why you’re doing it, like, you know, and the reader can pick that up right away. It says, effective writing helps the writer as well as the reader. How does effective writing help the writer as well as the reader?

Todd Rogers: Writing often helps us clarify our own thinking, and I think we conflate that with the other use of writing, which is getting an idea from me to you. And they are two totally different functions. And often we write our first draft and then at the end it was clear what we think that the highest order goal is. But that’s actually stage one. Stage two is then we need to actually make it as easy for the reader as possible to get it. The way it makes it easier for the writer. Writing effectively helps writers because one, it helps us achieve our goals, which is Jessica and my objective with this book, helping writers be more effective in achieving their goals. But it also, and we’ve all experienced this, the haranguing and harassment of people who haven’t read or responded to what we sent them, ineffective writing becomes a huge burden on the writer because people aren’t showing up, people aren’t responding, people are asking you questions. So writing effectively helps writers because it saves us all the follow up and all the hassle that we are experiencing as a part of hassling other people to respond to us. It saves you from that irritation.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another point you make, effective writing is not the same as beautiful writing. Flesh that out for us.

Todd Rogers: We are all taught how to write well. K through 12, K through college, we are taught these ideals of what good writing looks like, what beautiful sentences are, and using advanced vocabulary to be more precise. And I think that’s a critical stage on the road to becoming an effective person. But there’s a totally different project, which is not meeting some ideal, but actually communicating in the world to people who are not paid to read your writing and people who are most of the time trying to move on as quickly as possible. Like their goal is to hit delete or hit next as quickly as possible, often without even knowing what your point was. And so it’s like effective writing is writing for those people, not for people who are paid to give you feedback on your writing.

Brett McKay: Or it’s not for a novel for example. Like you might use some flowery language in a novel ’cause that’s what you’re trying to… You’re trying to do something. It’s basically beautiful writing and effective writing have two different goals.

Todd Rogers: Totally, yeah. A novel’s just a different function. We think of effective writing as being about professional practical writing where you’re texting a friend or you’re writing a web content or you’re writing an email to a coworker. All of it is like, it is not, you know, we’re not trying to layer in a third level of meaning with close reading about what adjective we used. We’re actually just trying to practically communicate something.

Brett McKay: Right. So effective writing is about getting stuff done, and you guys aren’t arguing in this book that we need to, you know, do sort of like an Orwellian news speak where all of our writing becomes effective writing. There’s still a place for New Yorker articles, there’s still a place for Tolstoy in writing like that. It’s just that you’re focused on how can we write so people get stuff done. That’s the focus.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, I like that. I mean, we probably could have incorporated that into the title. Yeah. There is a place for all that stuff, although that is a totally different function. It is leisure. You read the New Yorker Tolstoy because you are reading it recreationally to entertain yourself. And that is different than working your way through your text messages or your inbox.

Brett McKay: As a guy who’s on public policy, what have the consequences been of ineffective writing? Like real world consequences?

Todd Rogers: You could go across any domain for… It could be ineffective. Let’s say you’re a government and you’re communicating to the people who are delinquent in taxes, you’re mailing them and they’re not reading it. There’s all these studies on people are released from arrest and they’re given court summons. And if it is written in a way that is easy to read, they’re way more likely to actually show up to court and not have bench warrants issued for their arrest or signage in your public park asking you to pick up your dog’s poop written in pretty incomprehensible ways. Personally, like I have started two organizations. One is the Hub in Washington DC of using behavioral science and behavior change on public political communications and effective political communications, whether it’s Get Out the Vote or Fundraising or Volunteer Recruitment or Persuasion.

Another is a company that works with K12 school districts in communicating to families effectively, gets kids to go to school or not. And so writing in a way that makes it hard to understand, or just writing the way we sometimes do can undermine these important goals that organizations, campaigns, schools, companies have, which is trying to achieve some goal that is good for both the person who’s reading and the goal of the writer.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I’m sure everyone’s seen examples of the bad consequences of ineffective writing at their own work. You know, the company sends out a memo trying to get you to do something, but it’s written in this convoluted way or there’s just too much going on in the memo that there’s hardly any compliance at all.

Todd Rogers: Yeah. There’s, I mean, there’s some great examples. So there’s like a sign, there is a center for plain language. It is an organization that gives an award every year called the WTF Award for just the worst signage that has been created that year. WTF means words that failed, obviously, and the sign, a real sign, getting people to pick up their dog’s poop was persons shall remove all excrement from pets. I am certain that that was an ineffective sign and that 90% of people didn’t read it and understand that the goal was to scoop your pet’s poop. So yeah, it’s comically bad, but it’s clear. I mean, I’m sure the lawyers understood it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So before you start writing, the thing you say we need to do first is get inside your reader’s head. What do people need to understand about readers today so they understand like how a reader decides whether or not they’re gonna read something, whether they’re gonna read it all the way through, et cetera.

Todd Rogers: I think the TLDR of the whole thing, the too long didn’t read of the whole book or of this entire project that we’re doing is everyone is skimming everything, right? No one is spending as much time reading as we are writing and thinking about it. And so we need to write in a way that accommodates the reality that everyone’s skimming. So you get inside their head and know that they’re super busy and they have a long list of things to do and a lot of things they’d rather do than read whatever you’re sending them. And that includes text messages. We’ve run these experiments where even text messages, writing them so they’re easier to read makes people more likely to understand and respond to them. So if you’re gonna get in the reader’s head, it all starts with everyone’s busy and everyone’s skimming. And rarely do people care as much about what we’re writing as we do.

Brett McKay: And I love this too. You lay out a four stage process that readers go through when they’re deciding whether they’re going to engage with a piece of text, and this is whether it’s an email, a text, a Slack message, a social media post. The first part is you have to decide whether you’re gonna engage with it at all. So you just look at the thing and you kind of skim it and you’re like, well, am I even going to dig deeper into this? Second is, if you decide to engage, you must decide when to engage. Like what does that mean? Like sometimes you don’t read it right away?

Todd Rogers: Yeah, it’s a combination of the first and second. The second and third, which is the first most is the… I think the most important and kind of the most subtle, but everyone will relate to, which is if you have a long thing in front of you and a short thing in front of you, which are you gonna do first? Almost everyone is gonna do the short easy thing first. And so you look at it, it’s a wall of words and we call that deterrence. You are just deterred from reading it at all. And that’s like, I think that everyone should relate to. You open something, even a text message like, I can’t deal with that right now. Or you go to a webpage and it’s a long wall of words. The second and third are basically like, okay, so do I engage with it now or later?

And whenever I engage with it, how deeply do I read it? And I assume we actually have lots of evidence. What happens is the more difficult it is to read, the more you just sort of dart around, bounce around, see if you get the gist and eventually give up and move on. So those are the one through three. And the fourth one is deciding whether to respond or not, if you’re asking for some kind of response. And the easier the response, the more likely people are to do it. Just like the shorter the message, someone’s more likely to read that than a long one. If it looks like it’s gonna require a lot of research or it’s unclear what the question is, all these things make it just less likely people will deal with it at all, but definitely less likely they’ll deal with it now.

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk about what we can do as writers to increase the odds that someone will want to engage with whatever we’re throwing at them. They’ll want to maybe act on it faster, sooner rather than later. And, you know, engage with all of it and as well as, you know, respond, get more of response so we can get stuff done. And you and your co-author lay out six principles that writers can use to make sure that their writing is effective. The first principle, and you just kind of referred to it just a minute ago, less is more. So how does more often get in the way of your readers engaging with your text?

Todd Rogers: This is my favorite. I don’t wanna speak for Jessica on this. I love this. Less is more. You could probably go back to there’s a quote that every clever person who’s ever been alive has been credited with this quote, which is, I would’ve written you a shorter letter if I’d had more time. And what I love about that is it is worthy of apology. I have wronged you by giving you this longer than it needed to be text. And second, it takes more time to write less. Both of those are sort of central to this less is more idea. And the idea is, and we’ve run randomized experiments, lots of them, where the more sentences you add, the more ideas you add, just the longer it is, the less likely people are to read and understand and respond. Whether it’s soliciting a response, getting people to fill out a survey, getting people to… We worked with the, I don’t know if we named the party, but one of the big political parties, Democrat or Republican on a big fundraising email with 700,000 donors and arbitrarily deleted every other sentence.

So it didn’t even make sense anymore. So we cut it in half by making it incoherent and still increased donations. We’ve done lots of versions of this, but the idea is just you need to know there’s a trade off. The more you add, the less likely someone is to read, understand, and respond. And the optimal length in content is not nothing or one sentence. It’s just a trade off. You just need to know, the more you add, the less effective it’ll be. But you gotta make those trade-offs.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So you lay out some rules to apply this less is more. First one, use fewer words. And I mean, if you went to college or even high school, they taught, you know, this whole elements of style, just eliminate, and that was one of the rules. Eliminate needless words. You know, have everyone seen these wordy phrases for the reason that instead of saying that, just say, because you know.

Todd Rogers: Right. In order to.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Todd Rogers: Just say to.

Brett McKay: Just to. Whether or not, well, just weather.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Personal opinion. Well, there’s only one type of opinion. I mean, so just things like that can go a long way. But I love this idea. Rule number two, to include fewer ideas. So we’re talking about, maybe it’s a memo or an email you’re trying to write. Oftentimes you wanna try to cram as many things as you can in that piece of text. But what your research shows is like the fewer, the better. The fewer ideas you have in your email or memo, the more likely people are going to read what you wrote.

Todd Rogers: Yeah. And that’s hard. I mean, it’s hard for people because it requires judgment and prioritizing. Like what’s the most important thing I’m saying here? And it would be good for you to know this, but it’s not necessary. And so there’s trade offs all the way, like there are workarounds, like if it’s a webpage, you could have a link to the more content, or if it’s an email, you could have it below the sign off or as an attachment. Or if it’s a report, it could be an appendix. You can keep the detail, but you just need the core thing to be the core thing. And what we have is all this experimental evidence showing that when you dilute it with more content, you just are less likely to achieve your goal. And it just requires judgements and trade-offs the whole way.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You gave this great example. This was like a text. Could be a text to get together with some friends for dinner. The original one is, I’m looking forward to our 6:30 dinner tonight. Let’s eat at Tina’s Italian restaurant at 651 Ocean Drive. Their breadsticks are awesome. I haven’t had their lasagna, but I’m ready. It’s supposed to be tasty. Let’s meet at my place 15 minutes early and we’ll walk from there. Sam and Joy, are gonna join us for dinner too. Man, if I got that text, I’d be like, oh, geez, I’m gonna just have to look at this later. But you know, you could have just said, Hey, we’re having dinner, it’s at 6:15, meet at my place. That’s all you needed.

Todd Rogers: Right. And there is information in the rest of it. It’s just you got… And if you’re aware that there’s a trade off, then you have to treat it differently. Since writing the book, I’ve worked with a guy who’s in the CIA on who writes intelligence assessments in this group, in this intelligence group, and there’s 70 pages and that’s the norm. And he was like, well, how do I write less? Because if I write 35 pages, they’re gonna think I didn’t do my job. ‘Cause the norm is the norm. The norm is 70 pages. And so I actually love that because the answer is you can’t. Like, you have to write for your audience and what your audience expects, it has to look like what your audience expects. I mean, Jessica and I wrote a 207 page book where one of the principles is write less. The book, expect the book to look like a book. And so you have an audience that has norms and expectations, it has to look like what they expect, but then within those constraints, the easier you make it for them, the better. And so with a text message, I don’t think anyone cares whether you are interested in the breadsticks or not. They’re just like, when do I show up and who’s gonna be there?

Brett McKay: Right. Okay. Let’s move on to the second principle. Make reading easy. How do we typically make reading more difficult for our audience?

Todd Rogers: We write in grammatically correct, complicated ways. And so whether it is a long sentence or using unfamiliar, uncommon words, or writing in a like grammatically complicated way, it just makes it more cognitively taxing. So like a different way of thinking about all this in length and also writing style is just how do you make it less cognitively effortful? The easier it is, the more likely people will be to do it. So even if they’re gonna work their way through it, it’s just unkind to write in a way that taxes them and burdens them. We ran one experiment with Vice President Harris when she was the Attorney General of California, where, and I mean, I don’t know, the listeners are not, I hope no one is writing like this, but the California State Legislature required that schools send families letters when their kids are late or absent. And it starts with California Education Code, section 48260 provides that a pupil, child, subject to compulsory, I mean, it’s not even written for humans, and it’s like being sent to hundreds of thousands of families so the idea is we just add a round of editing where we just ask how do I make it just easier to pull the key info out? Even if we are correct, complete, and grammatically accurate, we just make it easier.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so you apply some rules. Use shorten common words, so there’s that whole quote. I think it was Mark Twain. Don’t use a $5 word when a 50-cent word will do. So instead of saying acquiesce, you can just say agree. You know, you don’t have to get fancy. You can save the $50 words for your New Yorker article you’re writing for yourself.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, for yourself, exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah, rule two, just use straightforward sentences. So this is, you’re not gonna do clauses and using semicolons and et cetera. Like, just really straightforward. Like, you can just glance at it, you know exactly what it says. Yeah, and then rule three, write shorter sentences. So, you know, just gotta edit, edit, edit, edit until you can get it down. You start writing like Hemingway, basically.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, that’s the idea, but no simpler than it needs to be. Right, like as simple as it can be, but no simpler.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so you give an example of a hard to read complex sentence and then editing it so it’s easier to read. Here’s the hard to read version. Often crafted from insidiously complicated language designed to abstract contentious details, ballot measures are propagated as a tool of direct democracy in 24 states in Washington, DC. So yeah, grammatically correct, but that was hard to read. Here’s the edited version. Ballot measures are used as a tool of direct democracy in 24 states and Washington, DC. They’re often written with deceptively complex language designed to hide controversial details. So yeah, that was a lot easier to read. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, second principle again, make reading easy. So we’re just gonna use fewer words, write shorter sentences and make sure your sentences aren’t hard to read with those parentheticals and semicolons and references back to things you said in a previous clause. Third principle is design for easy navigation.

Now, I’m sure a lot of people are listening to this. They probably learned in high school or in college, you know, some ideas or some rules about being concise with your writing. We’ve all probably read elements of style and that’s one of the rules. But I don’t remember being taught this. Well, actually I was taught this in law school, but I wasn’t taught this in undergrad or high school is thinking about the design of your writing so that it’s easy to read. So what does that look like? How can we lay out our writing so that it’s easier to navigate?

Todd Rogers: Yeah, I like this one. This is, I like all of them equally, but I like this and less is more the most. But the idea is it’s not even about writing, but realizing that people are gonna look at it and decide, do I read or not? Remember that stage of deterrence. Or once they’re reading, they’re just gonna dart around and see if they can get something out of it before they give up. And one metaphor or at least framework we use for thinking about it is that people may allocate like a fixed budget of time to reading your thing. And so then the question is just how do you make it easier for them to get what you want them to get out of it in that budget? And so that could be like adding headings. So it’s easy to know the structure. And when we actually do eye tracking, you see people jump around and read the headings first when they’re moving fast. Sometimes they just go first line, second line, but that’s when they’re anticipating reading the whole thing. But often they’ll just dart around and figure out what’s in here.

And we’ve actually run experiments where when you add headings in newsletters, you double the likelihood that people will read past the second paragraph and use anything in it past the second paragraph. The other one that people really like, and I really like, and I don’t know if you’re a veteran or how many of your listeners are veterans, but I work with a lot of active duty people in different branches of the military. One thing that they have in the US, started in the US Army and it spread across the militaries around the world is a thing called BLUF, bottom line up front, B-L-U-F, BLUF, bottom line up front. And it is a rule in the US Army, a rule that anything written to anybody, the first line has to be the bottom line. So there’s no long introduction, an enlisted person writing to a general, bottom line is the first line. And it makes it so much easier for readers and writers to know where’s the key info, where do I put the key info, where do I find the key info? But it especially helps people who are lower status, like an enlisted person writing to a general might have to say in the absence of that rule, like we ran into each other in Kandahar, you may not remember me, we chatted in the mess, I went to rival high school, we laughed about how the Philadelphia Eagles are gonna win the SuperBowl this year.

But I wanna ask you for a meeting. And so instead of the whole throat clearing, which would decrease the likelihood we get read at all, now they have this rule that doesn’t work everywhere, but having this rule in that environment and with that organization makes it just easier for everybody. And so another way to design for navigation is to have this kind of structure. So it’s easy to pull the key info out and jump around, but also when possible, make the bottom line super easy to pull out.

Brett McKay: Okay, so yeah, when you write an email, for example, just right at the very top, don’t you have to do the throat clearing stuff, just like here’s what this email is about.

Todd Rogers: Maybe, but it doesn’t work every, like it just depends on the expectations and norms, ’cause that can come off as too aggressive. I don’t do that. I still have a hope you’re well or good talking to you the other day. And I usually add that back. Like I’ll write my like all business part and then I’ll add some humanity to it because I don’t wanna come off as too aggressive. And so, but like within organizations, when we talk like the next step that Jessica and I are thinking and working on is like, so okay, so you’ve become more effective as a communicator. How do we get your team to be more effective? And it starts with just being intentional and explicit. Let’s just have a conversation. How do we write so we can all be on the same page instead of just letting these norms evolve without intention or guidance? Let’s be intentional about it. How do we write? Like the US Army decided BLUF so we can all be on the same page.

Brett McKay: Okay, I really like using headings. Like that’s something I learned in law school. When you write a memo, you break things up in headings so that the partner that you wrote the memo for can just glance at it and get to the information they might be particularly interested in. Another thing for easy navigation, add bullet points. Like using bullet points can help out a lot, especially if you’ve got more than two ideas or two requests in your communication.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, there’s a subtle one on the bullet points too where, which I think you were pointing to, is that if the bullet is kind of long, a skimmer still has to read the bullet to figure out what it’s about. And so one of the things that we have found is putting a title to the bullet, which may seem counter to fewer words. We’re just saying add a three-word title, which is extra words, makes it easier for a skimmer to know whether they should bother engaging with this bullet or whether they are free to move on. And so it’s a subtle thing, but the goal is just making it as easy for your reader to move on and get the key info that you want them to get. And then when we start talking about design, you can see that you want it to be aesthetically good-looking and consistent. And so you want the headings and titles to always look the same and things like that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, another rule you can apply for easy navigation, order your ideas by priority. That’s kind of that BLUF thing, maybe. But if you have more than one idea, like put the stuff that you care about the most right at the top, because the person’s gonna read that far and then they’re gonna start jumping around a lot after that point.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if they are gonna jump around, you wanna make it easy for them to jump around, which is why, like you said, you like to space it out with bullets or things, just making it visually easier.

Brett McKay: And then another rule, consider using visuals. Like don’t be afraid to put pictures in your communication. If that picture or visual can convey the message, what you’re trying to convey more efficiently.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, a colleague of mine and friend and mentor, Nancy Gibbs used to be the editor of Time Magazine. And I was really surprised to hear her say that a common feedback she would give to her reporters was does this have to be words? And I like, ’cause she’s a word person. And she said that that was a common challenge for writers, is like, is there an easier way to show this? Like, can it be a diagram instead of a full paragraph or two?

Brett McKay: And so the thing about designing for easy navigation, that takes time on your part as the writer. So it’s easy just to just crank out just a big block of text, maybe put a few paragraphs here and there. But thinking about headings, thinking about what could be bolded, thinking about the BLUF, that’s gonna take a bit more time than just cranking that thing out in just one fell swoop. You have to really be thoughtful about this. But the payoff is in the end. You invest that time upfront, so you save yourself some time and frustration on the back end.

Todd Rogers: Right, and if it’s really important for you, you wanna make it easy for the reader because you will be more effective. It’s also this kindness that I also think it’s kind of a subtle implication of all of it, is that it’s just nicer to your reader to make it easy in that way.

Brett McKay: All right, so the fourth principle is use enough formatting but no more. So I think one thing people do to help ensure that certain ideas stand out, they’ll use things like bold or underlines or all caps in a text message. How do people mess up formatting though when they’re trying to get their points across to the reader?

Todd Rogers: This has been the bigger surprise of writing this book for me. The biggest surprise has been people being really excited because they say, this has been a fight my entire career. And I have been saying, we need to write in a way that makes it easier. And people are like, this is just your taste and just your preference and has been dismissed. And now we bring to it all these randomized experiments and a lot of evidence from different ways of research. And it’s now actually a question of like scientific effectiveness. The other surprise has been when people email me, one, there’s a lot of anxiety I think that I’m gonna be judgmental and anyone who’s gonna email me, you do not have to worry. It turns out writing, reading and communicating are all hard. But the second thing is when I started saying use enough highlighting, but no more, it leads to people using different font colors, underline, bold, highlight, italics, all in the same thing. It was only eight sentences and there are six different kinds of stylistic formatting variants in the message. And the irony is that that actually is worse than nothing because it makes it harder for the reader to figure out what you think as the writer is the most important thing. Because if you only format, let’s say you bold one sentence, it is unambiguous to the reader. The writer thinks this is really important.

But if you do lots of different things, the six of the eight sentences, I have no idea as a reader what you think is most important and what any of the formatting even means. So use enough formatting. In surveys and experiments, we’ve seen that people jump to bold, underline and highlighted text. They jump to that and they think the writer is saying to them this is the most important content, get this. So it’s incredibly effective. It also licenses readers to not read anything else because they’ve gotten the key info and everyone’s goal is to move on. So you’ve got to use it carefully because it gets people to read that and also crowds out reading anything else. But then we use lots of kinds of formatting. It just confuses readers about what any of it means.

Brett McKay: Okay, so bolding, underlining, highlighting, it’s effective in getting the reader to think here’s what the writer thinks is important and to put their focus on that if that’s what you wanna do. And you see that a lot in online writing. Any formatting things that you see in online writing that aren’t effective?

Todd Rogers: I don’t like how links all get font color change and underlined because you actually, there is eye tracking research showing that people jump to that. And often the link is not the key info. The link is just the link. And so there’s this tension, there’s this norm. Everyone knows that’s what a link is, but it also kind of undermines the speed of consuming whatever we’re writing for people. And so actually the trade-off for me on that is like we wanna minimize the number of words that are linked if you can while still accurately describing whatever the link is. That’s sort of a small point, but one that aesthetically I don’t think we have a good solution to yet.

Brett McKay: All right, so use formatting, but don’t go crazy with it. You don’t have to use all the formatting options. Just pick one or two and then stick with that. And again, it’s gonna, the formatting use is gonna vary by context. Maybe in your organization you have a rule or a norm that you use in regards to formatting in order to show that this is important. So just follow that. The fifth principle is tell readers why they should care. But this is all about making sure that the reader actually engages with your content. So what can we do to show the reader like you should care about this and engage with this more than just a cursory glance?

Todd Rogers: Yeah, the way we thought about this is the obvious way to get a reader to read something is to write about something they care about. But we take it as given. The writer has the thing they wanna write about and the thing they’re trying to communicate. And it doesn’t really matter from the writer’s objectives whether this is the most interesting thing in the world for the reader, right? So we take as a given, you have your goal, your goal as a writer. Within that set of ideas or content, all we’re saying is you may as well emphasize the part of the things you’re going to say that they may value the most. So we report this experiment with Rock the Vote, which is like a voter registration organization that tries to target young people. And they were sending an email out to potential volunteers saying, will you volunteer to work at concerts to register concert goers to vote? And in one condition, the subject line was volunteer with Rock the Vote. And in the other condition, it was attend concerts for free. Maybe it was like volunteer and attend concerts for free. And so the subject line there is like drawing attention. The content is the same, exactly the same. You’re gonna volunteer at a concert and you’re gonna register voters. But we may as well emphasize the thing that people will value out of that set.

And so they ended up four X more effective, four times more effective, by just making the subject line focus within the set of ideas they’re gonna say in the message on the thing they think the recipient might care the most about. So that principle is just emphasize what the reader might care about within the bounds of what you’re already gonna say. We’re not saying you need to say something different. We’re just saying you may as well focus on the thing they may care about.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and then put that up front. Like don’t bury the lead on that. Don’t wait till the very end. Say, hey, this is why, you know, start off this like in the subject line. Here’s why you should care about this. And then put all the other information after that. And then another rule that you have for that for tell the readers why they should care is emphasize which readers should care. This is important ’cause sometimes you send out a message and it’s only going to a certain segment of the population. And if you make it too broad, you might end up causing the group of people you’re trying to communicate to just to ignore it completely.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, at minimum, it’s kind to your reader to let them loose. This is not for you, you’re free to go. But also in the intermediate term, as you communicate more, if you let people go when it’s not relevant to them, they’re gonna be more likely to attend when it is relevant to them.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you gave the example, like let’s say you have a grocery store and there’s been a recall on a product for safety. You know, the grocery store might put up a sign, notice important product safety recall information. Well, you know, if someone sees that and it’s like, well, I don’t know, maybe is it the product that I bought? I don’t, who knows, maybe I’ll just ignore this. And then you said, if you wanna have a reader’s perspective, the top line of that notice should say, if you bought soup XYZ in June, it has been recalled. And so like, oh, immediately the person seeing that, it’s like, well, did I buy that soup in June or not? And then they can make that decision whether they need to engage with it or not.

Todd Rogers: Right, well, Brett, also, I applaud you for getting, these are deep tracks in the book. You read it closely.

Brett McKay: I read the book.

Todd Rogers: Nice, yeah.

Brett McKay: And you make it easy to read. So it made me wanna keep reading it.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, we wrote it so it was skimmable. For anyone listening, it is easy to skim. But if you want the details on any topic, you can dive deep in it.

Brett McKay: You can dive deep. So the sixth principle is make responding easy. Not all communications require response, but a lot of the communications that we put out there to get stuff done, they require responses. So what can we do to make responding easier?

Todd Rogers: I know that there are other, that your listeners and you follow other behavioral scientists, like behavioral economists or social psychologists who work on behavior change, which is basically what my research has been on for the last 25 years. And all of that is this, which is the takeaway is, if you want someone to do something, we should make it easy for them. And so whether that means reducing the number of steps required to take the action or providing checklists or pre-populating forms, or even like, here’s something completely basic that we’ve all had, which is let’s schedule a meeting. There are four of us on an email thread. These six times work for me, which worked for you? And then if you reply in a paragraph, well, I can do the first time, but I’d have to move a couple meetings. The second time’s better for me, but the third doesn’t work. And the fourth could work if nothing else works. Like the amount of effort required to decipher which of the times you’re proposing actually work is, you know, you’re adding 35, 40 seconds to the next person to figure it out. If we actually wanted everyone to respond, you say, of those times…

These two work for me.

Brett McKay: Period.

Todd Rogers: Nobody cares whether it means you have to move a meeting. So the idea is if it’s important to you that someone get back to you you wanna make it as easy as possible. If it’s important for us we wanna make it easy for them. I’ll often ask students imagine you have a task that will take five minutes and a task that will take 30 seconds. Both of them are on your to-do list and you plan to do both eventually. Which are you gonna do first. Almost everybody’s gonna do the 30-second task first. And so the idea is you just wanna make it easy. As easy as possible.

Brett McKay: Right. And so that means maybe you have to do some decision structuring for the person. Like here I need you to make this decision. Just this one decision. And then after that you can maybe follow up if you need to make other decisions but just pick one thing you want them to respond to.

Todd Rogers: Yeah. In the less is more there’s fewer requests. If you ask someone to do two things you are less likely to get them to do any one of them than if you ask them to do just one. The idea is we’ve got to prioritize. We have our goals and we need to write in a way that makes it easy for the reader to help us achieve our goals. And that means simplifying the request. Like you’re saying if I asked you what do you think versus I’m going to submit this. Agree or disagree? Yes or no? Do you sign off? They end up being… It’s much easier to say yes agree submit than an open-ended what do I think? And so it’s just my prediction and some of the evidence is… All the evidence is consistent with. People are more likely to respond and more likely to respond sooner when it’s a yes no question than open-ended.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another rule you have in this make responding easy is organizing key information that’s needed to take action. So let’s say you make a request for something at your work or something but then in order for the reader to answer that they have to start trolling through all this information or kind of doing this scavenger hunt to even start putting together a response. Well, if that’s the case they’re gonna drag their feet on that or they’re gonna take a long time. Instead if there’s an answer you need right away provide the reader with as much information as possible that they need in that communication so they can give you the response you need. Okay. So those are the six principles and I think if people had those in mind as they wrote they’d get a lot more done with their writing. At the end of the book beyond these six principles you talk about some other ideas that you’ve seen in your research and your own personal experience when it comes to communicating and getting people to respond to your writing and getting stuff done with writing. And one topic you talk about is frequency of communicating.

This is something I struggle with when it comes to communication in my business or in organizations that I belong to ’cause I worry about communicating too much. ‘Cause I don’t wanna bug people. But something I’ve noticed is that when I do communicate more I get more responses. I get more people showing up for things or doing things. So what’s the research say? How often should I hit people with the same information so that it’s effective?

Todd Rogers: There is not a single answer for this just like there’s not a single stable answer for when should you communicate because the equilibrium changes. If the answer is Thursday at 3:00 PM everyone is gonna communicate on Thursday at 3:00 PM making yours less effective and then the equilibrium moves around it’s an unstable equilibrium. Similarly for frequency of communication I think there isn’t a good answer but my first pass at it is if you think that your reader wants your communication and values it like your newsletter? If you think that they really want it then you wanna be consistent so they know when to expect it and have it look the same so they can recognize quickly what it is. In the intermediate term if we communicate all the time we will decrease people’s likelihood that they associate us with something they should read and they will start to view us as a pest and they will unsubscribe. And so I know there are a lot of organizations that have big lists. The balance that we’re always talking about is you can increase donation for example by sending more messages you also increase unsubscribes and so what’s the two, three-year horizon consequence is you may end up being worse off for having gotten more donations in this week by sending more messages.

But in the intermediate horizon you’re worse off. There isn’t a great answer. I don’t know. Do you have thoughts on this? It sounds like you wrestle with it.

Brett McKay: I wrestle with it. No. So it sounds like it’s the killing the goose that lays the golden egg problem.

Todd Rogers: Right. Yeah exactly.

Brett McKay: Right. You can extract a lot of value by doing a lot of frequency in the short term but in the long term you end up killing the thing that provides you value. So when it comes to let’s say you belong to I don’t know a sports league or I don’t know a church congregation there’s an event coming up. That’s the thing where I’ve found that more frequent communication helps up to a point. You can’t just do one and expect to get a response ’cause people might just miss that first email or they read it and then they forgot about it and then the event comes up two weeks later and they’re like I didn’t know about it. It’s like well I sent you that email. So I think something like that I need one email maybe two weeks out and then maybe a week out you send a reminder and then two days before you send a final reminder that could work. I mean, if you did a reminder every single day people are just gonna tune you out.

Todd Rogers: I think there’s consistency in that too Brett where it’s like I’m on a board where they send materials out a week in advance and then they send them the night before again. And so I know two weeks in advance I don’t need to deal with this ’cause I know it’s coming back right before. And so if they stopped doing that and they just did it occasionally I think I and the other members would all be less prepared because we’ve come to expect that oh this is just the forewarning before the real one. I think consistency is probably key there. People start to associate you with that pattern.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But I also think yeah frequency can be a tool to help a harried reader because people are just getting inundated with stuff and they’re gonna miss things. This can even happen with your friends with text messages, right? You send a friend a text and you don’t hear back from them and you think oh man they hate me. They don’t like me anymore. So now they… If their text inbox is anything like yours it’s just getting inundated with two-factor authentications, reminders about their kid’s doctor’s appointment. So maybe the friendly thing to do would be, Hey, follow up two days later if they haven’t gotten back to you because they needed that. So I think with frequency yeah there’s a balance but I think maybe don’t be afraid of nudging more than you think ’cause you’re probably not actually nudging ’cause the people probably didn’t see your initial message anyways.

Todd Rogers: Yeah, I like that. I also think when you talk about a friend or a coworker with whom you communicate a lot I do think the answer, and this is probably the answer for most questions is to communicate better and to actually have a discussion about it. And this is something that we stumbled into. Well, there isn’t a universal rule for this. Some people will view you pinging them again as like yeah man I read it. I got you. Stop harassing me. Others will be like Thank you. And so a different way if this is someone you communicate with a lot is to just ask. Would it be useful if I send follow-ups or not? I actually have all sorts of people that they have incredibly varied preferences and for people I communicate with a lot. I actually have started to learn what they are because I ask.

Brett McKay: I’m curious are there any AI tools that you’re seeing out there that are helping writers write more effectively?

Todd Rogers: Are you setting me up for… Did I show you mine?

Brett McKay: No.

Todd Rogers: Or is that…

Brett McKay: No.

Todd Rogers: So early on we trained GPT-4 or GPT-3.5 and then now GPT-4o the OpenAI’s latest LLM on the… With your listeners in the show notes I hope we’ll share the checklist. There’s a one-page checklist for how to write for busy readers and we trained the large language model on these principles and then we fed it what’s called Few-Shot Learning just three pre-post examples of emails an original and an edited. Original edited original edited. It’s incredible at editing emails so that they are skimmable and it now has hundreds of thousands of uses and I get emails all the time from people saying that they put any important message through it to just get suggestions. So it’s on our website. I’ll share it with you. It’s writingforbusyreaders.com but it’s very cool. The large language models you could think of as they learn inductively they consume all the way we’ve ever written and then they infer rules and predictions.

This is much more deductive top down. We’re like look there are these six principles. We should edit through the lens of these principles because this is actually what the science suggests people are more likely to read and respond to and it learns those and then it can revise in accordance with and we shouldn’t use words like in accordance. We shouldn’t use… It writes in ways that are consistent with that. So writingforbusyreaders.com but I love it. We’re trying to get it internalized by the other big large language model especially the ones who work in email clients.

Brett McKay: Well, Todd this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book? So I guess that one website?

Todd Rogers: Writingforbusyreaders.com writingforbusyreaders.com and the Too long didn’t read of this whole thing. If you made it to the end and you don’t know the big takeaway. The big takeaway is we should add a round of editing to everything we write where we ask ourselves how do I make it easier for the reader? How do I make it easier for the reader? Because the easier it is for the reader the more effective we are at achieving our goals and it’s just kinder.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well Todd Rogers thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Todd Rogers: Thanks Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today’s Todd Rogers. He’s the author of the book Writing for Busy Readers. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website writingforbusyreaders.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/busyreaders where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you haven’t done so already I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already. Thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always. Thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only to listen to AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

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