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Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World

Introduction

  • Page 2 Simple thing that anyone can do but that most of us don't do particularly well.
  • Page 2 We know why certain types of writing draw a reader's focus while others tend to get lost in the fog of distraction and competition for attention.
  • Page 3 ... account for how busy people read.
  • Page 5 Effective writing is not the same as beautiful writing. ... Often, beautiful writing is intentionally demanding and multilayered. ... Effective writing is not so subjective.
  • Page 7 We too often believe our readers will find our messages as important to them as they are to us,
  • Page 9 Much of the formal writing we learned in school is irrelevant or counterproductive for real- world practical writing.
  • Page 10 Our principles derive from the sciences of psychology and human behavior, blended with a social understanding that most people have limited time and attention.

    Part One: Engaging the Reader

    Get Inside Your Reader's Head

  • To be an effective writer, we need to remember that our readers experience the scarcity of time every bit as acutely as we do. Their distractions influence both what they read and how they read ... Not only do we have limited time, we also have limited attention.
  • Page 17 We cannot notice or process everything in front of us. We can exhaust our focus over time, often in less time than we think. We struggle focusing on multiple things at one time, but we still try.
  • Page 18 For readers, selective attention also guides what they visually notice and focus on when interacting with any kind of writing.[
  • Page 19 elements that have a strong visual contrast with their surroundings.
  • Page 20 trying. Our brains have evolved to automatically notice things that stand out from their surroundings.
  • Page 20 Shortcut #2: Our selective attention can be intentionally and purposefully directed.
  • Page 21 When we look for something specific, our attention system helps us efficiently and quickly find it.
  • Page 21 In the process of noticing some elements, we miss others -- Brain research has revealed that when you notice and examine one item in a visual scene, the brain actively suppresses noticing other items that are also present.
  • Page 23 The brain's ability to ignore irrelevant information
  • Page 24 Once we get distracted, it is hard to refocus.
  • Page 25 Writing effectively for busy people requires keeping in mind just how easily they (and we, all of us) can get worn down and distracted.
  • Page 25 it's not even possible to be thinking about two tasks at the exact same time.
  • Page 26 The bottom line is that your mind works most effectively when it has a clear anchor point: one thing it is noticing, one thing it is focusing on, one task that it needs to initiate in response.
  • Page 26 Writing that respects those limitations is more likely to get through to a busy brain—and to the reader who possesses it.

    Think Like a Busy Reader

  • Page 30 Every time a reader encounters a written communication—even something as short as an email, a text, a Slack message, or a social media post—they go through a four-stage process: ... First, they must decide whether to engage with it at all. Second, if they decide to engage, they then must decide when to engage. Sometimes the decision to engage leads to a decision to engage later. Third, once they do engage, they must decide how much time and attention to allocate to reading the message. Fourth, if they read something that requires a response, they must decide whether to respond or react. ... Our job as effective writers is to navigate each of the four critical rounds in that brief but daunting process.
  • Page 31 Busy readers routinely decide how valuable a message is without actually reading it! ... One common rule of thumb is that, when faced with a lot of options, we pick the first one that seems good enough (sometimes called "satisficing"),
  • Page 32 They also consider the costs involved: How much time and effort will be required to engage? ... They are more likely to engage with messages that are short or that appear easy to navigate because they seem like they will require less time, attention, and effort to read. ... Most of us prefer doing enjoyable, pleasant, easy, and gratifying things now and push off less pleasant, more difficult things until later.
  • Page 34 The tendency to privilege the present over the future is hardwired into us. ... Busy readers are likely to prioritize messages they think can be dealt with easily and quickly, because they seem more enjoyable (or at least less awful).
  • Page 35 Busy readers aim to extract as much value as possible from a communication with as little time and attention as possible. ... They may closely read one section, skim another, and jump around in yet another, searching for specific information that they consider relevant.
  • Page 36 reading for utility is an efficient strategy for extracting as much information as possible while expending as little time and attention as possible.
  • Page 37 Skimming often involves skipping words, phrases, and even paragraphs. It also often involves jumping forward in anticipation, and jumping backward to review
  • Page 38 Readers often expect the first sentence of a paragraph to orient them to what the rest of the paragraph is about. Guided by that expectation, they may spend more time reading those opening sentences and use them to decide what (if anything) to read more closely.[13] ... Readers skip over large swaths of text, mainly landing on anchor points: headings, first sentences of paragraphs, images, and formatting that visually contrasts with the rest of the text.
  • Page 41 Before you can start to write for busy readers, though, you must be very clear about why you are writing: To communicate effectively, you need to know your goals.

    Know Your Goals

  • If your reader is going to spend just five seconds on your message, what is the most important information you want them to come away with?
  • Page 44 Anything that disrupts the flow of words distracts the reader. ... Taking the time to clean up your words and present them readably is a first step toward engaging your reader.
  • Page 45 "What is the most important information I want my readers to understand?" and "How do I make it easier for my readers to understand it?" ... A reader overlooks information that we consider important and fails to act the way we want, that is not the reader's fault.

    Part Two: Six Principles of Effective Writing

    First Principle: Less Is More

  • More writing leads readers to be less likely to read anything.
  • Page 50 Although concise writing saves time and effort on the part of the reader, it requires more time and effort from the writer.
  • Page 51 patents: We tend to add ideas rather than subtract or remove them in the editing process.[4]
  • Page 52 Readers often interpret the length of a message as an indication of how difficult and time-consuming it will be to respond to, which is another reason why they might choose not to engage with a wordy communication.
  • Page 54 Most readers, but especially those who are pressed for time, are likely to be put off by messages and requests that they expect will be difficult to deal with.[7] ... A wordy message will be dealt with less quickly than a concise message.
  • Page 55 Readers' attention is more likely to drift when reading longer messages.[8] ... Writing concisely requires a ruthless willingness to cut unnecessary words, sentences, paragraphs, and ideas.
  • Page 56 Nancy Gibbs, former editor in chief of Time magazine, would tell her staff that every word has to earn its place in a sentence, every sentence has to earn its place in a paragraph, and every idea has to earn its place in a text.[10]
  • Page 57 The bottom line is that effective writing needs to be appropriate to the context of the communication. We can provide the guidelines, but you have to make the informed decisions about how to balance your desire to include more words, ideas, and requests with the many constraints facing a busy reader.

    Rule 1: Use Fewer Words

  • Page 59 Replace this . . . (Wordy) . . . with this (Concise) ... Sometimes it is worth losing a little precision and meaning to save readers' time. ... Strategic omission.
  • Page 61 Like cutting words, cutting ideas often requires discarding less important but still relevant information to emphasize the more important information.

    Rule 3: Make Fewer Requests

    Second Principle: Make Reading Easy

  • acquiesce versus agree:
  • Page 80 Shorter words are generally more readable than longer words and common words are generally more readable than uncommon words.
  • Page 82 Tweets using the most common words received about 75% more retweets than tweets using the least common words.[
  • Page 83 In many contexts, using words like "sophisticated" instead of "fancy" can come across as pretentious or exclusionary.
  • Page 84 Even in academia there has been a shift toward more readable writing. The association for marketing professionals and scholars, the American Marketing Association, instructs would-be authors that its journal "is designed to be read, not deciphered."[
  • Page 84 When you are balancing the trade-offs between readability and using longer, less common but (potentially) more precise words, ask yourself two questions. First, how valuable are the subtle differences in word meaning for conveying the essence of the sentence? Second, is the additional meaning conveyed by the harder-to-read word worth the costs of fewer readers engaging and understanding it and the increased effort required by those who do?

    Rule 2: Write Straightforward Sentences

  • Write so that readers can understand the meaning of a sentence after a single read-through.

    Rule 3: Write Shorter Sentences

  • Page 90 Writing in a style that is easy to read is not necessarily easy to write.
  • 6. Third Principle: Design for Easy Navigation > Page 95 designing the written content to be easy to navigate.
  • Page 95 they should immediately be able to grasp its purpose, main points, and structure.
  • Page 95 stop thinking of your message as a set of words and think of it instead as a type of map.
  • Page 96 But letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs are intensely visual; they are literally graphic elements on the page or screen.
  • Page 97

    Rule 1: Make Key Information Immediately Visible

  • Page 97 Sometimes writers bury the lede intentionally to spur curiosity and intrigue. ... But practical communications aren't relaxed literary voyages, and they shouldn't be written like them. ... "What do I want my readers to take away from this?"
  • Page 98 put the most important information in the places where busy readers most likely expect to find ... US Army: bottom line up front (BLUF).
  • Page 99 Abstracts, executive summaries, and TL;DR headlines similarly function as "key information" locations for busy readers.
  • Page 101 One of the most visually clear ways to signal to readers that ideas are distinct is to list each one with a bullet point.

    Rule 3: Place Related Ideas Together

    Rule 4: Order Ideas by Priority

  • Page 107 The first item in a list usually gets the most attention from the reader. ... In certain contexts, the last position in an ordered list can also be influential ... Studies of jury trials have found that the final evidence presented to the jurors can be the most heavily weighted and remembered.

    Rule 6: Consider Using Visuals

    Fourth Principle: Use Enough Formatting but No More

  • Page 126 Formatting serves two main purposes. First, it conveys meaning over and above the meaning of the words themselves. Second, formatting helps capture readers' attention by making certain words stand out against the others.

    Rule 1: Match Formatting to Readers' Expectations

  • Page 128 Because importance and emphasis are not the same, and because readers may interpret italics and font colors as conveying either of those meanings, writers who want to use these tools need to be careful to manage their ambiguity.
  • Page 129 Writers can announce their style up front ... A majority of survey respondents also interpreted all caps as signaling importance, but a sizable fraction (25%) volunteered that they regarded all caps as conveying anger instead.
  • Page 130 Some state laws explicitly mandate that all caps must be used to highlight key sections in specific types of agreements,
  • Page 131 Bullets are extremely useful formatting tools, though they, too, suffer from mixed interpretations. ... readers look to the sentence preceding a bulleted list to determine whether the list itself is worth reading.
  • Page 132 The varied ways that readers interpret bullets mean that they need to be used carefully.
  • Page 133 Using bullet points to list low-priority items risks misdirecting the reader away from what truly matters. ... Busy readers should never need to stop and question what you mean by the bolded (or italicized, highlighted, underlined, etc.) text.
  • Page 134 Because these formatting types are so effective, they can have an important unintended consequence: They will easily draw readers' attention away from everything else.
  • Page 135 The key message here is that highlighting, bolding, and underlining involve trade-offs: They increase the likelihood that readers read the formatted words, but they can decrease the reading of everything else.

    Rule 3: Limit Your Formatting

  • Page 136 avoid formatting multiple items when you particularly want your reader to focus on just one.
  • Page 139 find the focal point hidden within that mess.

    Fifth Principle: Tell Readers Why They Should Care

  • Page 141 Most of us are not very good at imagining the world from someone else's perspective. In a whimsical but illustrative study, Stanford researcher Elizabeth Louise Newton divided test subjects into two groups, tappers and listeners. The tappers tapped out the rhythm of familiar songs such as "Happy Birthday" and "The Star-Spangled Banner"; the listeners tried to guess the songs being tapped. Then came the true test. Tappers were asked to imagine being listeners and to predict what fraction of the listeners would correctly identify the songs. Tappers predicted a success rate of 50%. In reality, listeners got it right just 2.5% of the time![1] Tappers were terrible at getting into the mindset of the listeners, and had no idea how terrible they were at it.

    Rule 1: Emphasize What Readers Value ("So what?")

  • Page 147 A good shorthand for writers who are working on practical communications is: "So what?" Try to picture the recipient of your message and consider what would make that person care about what you are saying. An additional factor to consider is not only why the reader should care but why the reader should care now—that is, the timeliness of the message.

    Rule 2: Emphasize Which Readers Should Care ("Why me?")

  • Page 147 Being explicit about your intended audience is especially pertinent in mass communications that are difficult to target to specific populations.
  • 9. Sixth Principle: Make Responding Easy > Page 151

    Sixth Principle: Make Responding Easy

  • Page 151 Not only do you want your readers to read and understand your message, you also want them to perform a concrete action.

    Rule 1: Simplify the Steps Required to Act

    Rule 2: Organize Key Information Needed for Action

  • Page 160 As an effective writer, part of your job is to ensure your readers have all the necessary information in one accessible location. If readers have to seek out the information needed to act, they will be more likely to put it off and eventually forget the request entirely.

    Rule 3: Minimize the Amount of Attention Required

  • Page 160 Writers commonly offer their readers too many choices.
  • Page 161 Minimizing the amount of attention required to act can have important pragmatic consequences.
  • Page 164 Just as readers may be deterred from acting if they have to search for the necessary information about what to do, readers may also be deterred if they don't understand the steps required—how to do it. Part Three: Putting the Principles to Work

    Tools, Tips, and FAQs

    Writers should aim to use the fewest number of words, ideas, and requests necessary to achieve their goals, and no fewer.
  • Page 172 The longer the message, the more challenging it can be to stay focused on why you are writing and what outcome you hope to achieve. Keeping your writing goals clear and top of mind can help you decide what information stays and what goes.
  • Page 176 Using introductory text to tell readers what the rest of the text is about is called "signposting." ... Although it typically adds words, it can be helpful for making longer messages or messages with multiple pieces of information easier to navigate.
  • Page 181 When you edit for conciseness, you should also review your language to make sure it matches the needs and expectations of your readers. Knowing your audience is the best way to ensure that your language matches their needs and expectations.
  • Page 184 Send messages when your readers are most likely to have time and motivation to read and respond.
  • Page 185 Ultimately, understanding your specific readers is the best way to know when the "right" time is to send communications.
  • Page 190 Social media writing should adhere to the same principles as other forms of practical writing. ... One of the strengths of digital communications is that it makes it easy to connect readers to other online sources.
  • Page 191 But if hyperlinks are not the most important information in a message, they can crowd out other information, much as other types of formatting can. ... Linking the fewest words possible while also ensuring that the hyperlinked words convey some meaning can help everyone, but especially the visually impaired and others who rely on audio reading tools.
  • Page 192 Humor and sarcasm are risky because people can easily misunderstand them in their written form.
  • Page 192 Emojis can lead to similarly unintended and unanticipated confusion, especially across varied age groups.[
  • Page 193 It remains to be seen whether emojis continue to evolve to take on serious connotations and meanings.
  • Page 193 For now, though, writers should be cautious and clear when using emojis in important writing, given their wide range of possible interpretations.

    Our Words, Our Selves

  • Before composing any message, writers have to decide on their overall style and tone. Often there are context-specific norms you can turn to for guidance.
  • Page 198 some research has found that readers are more likely to respond to government communications written in relatively formal language, in part because formality acts as a signal of credibility in the public-sector context. ... As a general rule, a formal communication style works better when that is what readers expect.
  • Page 199 Striking the right balance between precision and personality is especially consequential for writers who are women, racial and ethnic minorities, or of lower social or professional status. Power, status, race, gender, and other stereotyped identities can affect how readers expect people to write, and especially the warmth they are expected to convey.
  • Page 201 In certain settings, a writer's goal is not to be read and understood but rather the exact opposite. Some writers aim to obfuscate, obscure, and hide information they must disclose but would rather not.