916: Six Principles for Writing to Busy Readers with Todd Rogers

Todd Rogers

Thanks, Pete. Happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s fun. I saw you have the book Pre-Suasion on your bookshelf, and then we had a moment of discussing how we both love Dr. Robert Cialdini, who we interviewed on the show and which was one of my favorite guests ever partly because we wanted him for so long. But you actually got to collaborate directly with him. Tell us the tale.

Todd Rogers

Well, I read his book Influence: The Science of Persuasion in undergrad, and I was like, “This stuff is cool.” And not too long after college decided I wanted to get a PhD in work, just like that, and so he was always on my mind. And then as I got to know him as a social psychologist and behavioral scientist, eventually, a few years ago, he and I had been talking about a project for a while, and he asked if I wanted to collaborate with him, with Jessica, my co-author on the book that I hope we’re about to talk about.

And I actually got choked up on the phone call when he asked if we would collaborate with him because I just felt like it was full circle that he was a real inspiration for why I’m doing a lot of this stuff. So, yeah, so it was really cool. We did a paper on how to respond to attack ads, and the psychology of how to respond to attack ads when your attacker is louder and dishonest. I don’t know where, we just came up with that.

Pete Mockaitis

So, it’s like if I’m running for office.

Todd Rogers
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, just for my future reference, should that be coming down the pike for me, how do I respond to louder and lying attack ads?

Todd Rogers

I haven’t thought about this paper in a little bit but the basic idea is that you often respond to an attack by countering it, you say, “That’s not true. I did not crash my car while drinking,” and so on. And then, in a way, it reinforces the underlying message, whatever the attack was, let’s say I was falsely accused of drunk driving and getting into a car accident.

And so, Bob had this idea that is just brilliant, obviously, was what you should do is, instead, say, “When my opponent says this, know that what they are really doing is deflecting from the fact that they have broken the law in so many other ways.” And so, what you do is you create a different association so that whenever the attack comes, people cognitively associate it with its own response.

And so, it’s called the poison parasite. You sort of parasitically attach the response so that whenever they reuse the image, or the phrase, or the whole idea, it automatically, through memory, what’s called conditioned association, it automatically makes accessible its response that negates the attack.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, that’s just handy to know for future reference.

Todd Rogers

Yeah, that’s not what we’re talking about but it’s cool. It’s cool how memory, like you can associate things to other objects so that when those objects come up, they bring to mind other things. And so, instead of responding directly, which is you should keep repeating their phrase, and say, “When they use this phrase, think of this. When they use this phrase, think of this.” And then whenever they use the phrase, it becomes self-negating.

Pete Mockaitis

Fabulous. Thank you. Well, we are talking about your book Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. And I’d love it if you could share with us – having studied reading and writing for so long – can you kick us off with a particularly striking, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about this stuff over your career that really sticks with you?

Todd Rogers

It’s a really high bar but I will start with something that, after saying it, is obvious but is underappreciated. No one is reading what we’re writing. That’s a place to start. Everyone is skimming. Everyone is busy, and their goal, when they read anything we send them, is to move on as quickly as possible, so quickly that very often it means moving on before even understanding what we’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, that sounds true. I guess in our heart of hearts, if we don’t want to believe it, “Well, surely, my trusted colleagues and collaborators, who value my input, are carefully reading,” do you have any striking datapoints or studies that underscores this?

Todd Rogers

We’ve a ton of randomized trials where we test different elements of writing to see whether people are actually reading it. So, let me just do one. One of the principles in the book, the book is called Writing for Busy Readers, and one of the principles is less is more. And we do a whole series of these experiments, I’ll just describe one, where someone is sending a message, in this case, it could be fundraising messages, it could be like sign up for registration of a webinar, it could be fill out a survey, it could be respond to me about a time.

We’ll do one where I was emailing 7,000 elected school board members. We’d written a web crawler, I was surveying them. And it started with a bunch of gratitude expressions and respect, “Thank you so much.” Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis

“Thank you so much for serving the youth and shaping the future generation.”

Todd Rogers
You got it, Pete. It sounds like you could’ve written it where you just dictate this, but it turns out that was all useless but you got the spirit of it. So, along “Thank you. You’re so important. You’re doing great stuff. And you are. It’s a really hard job. Nobody likes you because you’re making hard choices. Thank you. Will you please fill up my survey?”

And in the other condition, we said, “I’m a professor,” same first sentence, and then deleted all the gratitude, “Please fill up my survey.” And the important thing is we had a couple hundred people read both versions and predict which one will get more responses. Literally, almost everyone, 93% of people think that the more deferential, longer message will get more responses. But consistent with literally every experiment we’ve ever run on this topic, the shorter one was substantially more effective, in this case, twice as many respondents when we eliminated all the extra words.

Similarly, I read an experiment with a large federal political committee. I’m not supposed to say which party but one of the big parties in the United States, and there aren’t that many, and they were sending 700,000 donors an email for fundraising with six paragraphs. I just said, “Let’s arbitrarily delete every other paragraph so it doesn’t even make sense anymore. So, we just went from six to three by just randomly deleting paragraphs. People read them. They agree it’s incoherent where we cut every other paragraph. Still increases donation by 16%. One principle is less is more.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Wow! Oh, I can see why we all, why you and I both love Bob Cialdini, and I love everything you’re saying – data-driven and impactful. Wow! So, you said almost nothing, “I’m a professor. Please fill out this survey” and that is ideal.

Todd Rogers

Well, yeah, it works like flagging. It is almost certainly better if someone reads all the respectful deferential verbiage, that that is probably more effective if they read it all because I’m showing all the respect. But stage one is, “Do they read it at all?” And it is very common to just deter people from engaging with what we write by just having extra words.

Think about how you go through your inbox. I do these surveys whenever I teach it, it’s like, “Okay, you have two messages in your inbox. One is three sentences, the other is three paragraphs. Which one do you read first?” Everyone reads the three-sentence one. Everybody’s busy, everybody’s skimming, and they’re just doing triage with this like a flood of stuff coming at them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I suppose the exceptions are probably quite limited, like, “I am choosing to read a novel for the pleasure of enjoying reading words and visualizing scenes and connecting with these characters.” There’s that but that’s maybe, is it fair to say, Todd, that’s only when you’re reading novels more or less?

Todd Rogers

Yeah, when we’re reading poetry, when we’re reading The New Yorker, or when we’re reading novels, it’s a different purpose of reading. The kind of writing that Jessica and I are talking about in the book is practical writing. It could be text messaging your parents to coordinate for Thanksgiving dinner. It could be writing to your boss. It could be sending a sales pitch or a proposal to a client. Practical writing that is not recreational, everybody’s skimming. The TLDR version of our long book, which is not that long, is we need to make it easier for our readers. And the easier we make it for our readers to read and skim, the more likely they are to read, understand, and respond.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Less is more, that’s powerful and self-explanatory. You gave us a couple of examples. But tell us, Todd, is there anything else we need to know about this principle to begin putting it into action right away and enjoy its benefits?

Todd Rogers

There are three parts to less is more but I will be very, very brief about it. Fewer words, fewer ideas, which is the hard part. That means deciding some ideas may be helpful but not worth it because there’s tradeoffs. And the third is fewer requests, which I think people don’t intuitively get at first. If I asked you for four things, one, you may postpone doing any of them; two, you’re going to do the easiest one first; and, three, you may just get derailed on the process of going from one to two, and then you just get distracted.

We’ve seen in experiments of all kinds of variety that when you ask for multiple things, you’re less likely to get any one of those things done than if you ask for one thing. And so, again, just like writing, it just requires prioritizing, like knowing what your most important things are, and deciding whether it’s worth the cost of adding more.

Pete Mockaitis

So, let’s say, Todd, I am sending out a sales pitch or I want to persuade you or some other guest to appear on the podcast, I could say, less is more, say, “Hey, I think your book is awesome. Come on to my show.” But I think, as I put myself in their shoes, it’s like, “Okay, who are you? And is your show legit?” So, I got to give them a little more, but do I have an attachment or a link? Or, how do I think about this?

Todd Rogers

There isn’t a single right answer. You know your context, your goals, your audience. That said, you know that I’m skimming. And so, what we say in my lab, and I’m not saying everyone should do it, but in our lab, no email should be more than four sentences. Let me give you context. 

In our lab, it would be like, “Pete,” sentence one, “so fun being on the podcast. Thanks for having me.” Two, “At the end, you asked me a question about this.” Third, “Below, I have more details about that,” or attached, or linked, “Here are more details.” Four, “Let me know if you have any other questions about it.” And then, “Todd.”

Then underneath that, I can have it organized so that it’s easy to skim, and we can use the other principles. But what you don’t want is it to be buried in four paragraphs later, like, “Oh, the details of the answer to your question.” And so, if you’re emailing me, I think probably the optimal way is, like, the first paragraph is some version of it’s three sentences or two sentences, being like, “Admire your work. We’d love to have you on the podcast. Details of the podcast are below. Lots of great people have been on it, including our mutual friend, Bob Cialdini.” And then below, it’s like, “I’m the best. And How to be Awesome at Your Job is awesome, and you’d be more awesome at your job if you’re on my podcast,” or whatever it is.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Cool. So, less is more, fewer ideas, fewer words, fewer requests. Let’s hear the second one, make reading easy.

Todd Rogers

Make reading easy. And that is short words, common words, short simple sentences. The coolest thing that I learned when Jessica and I were writing this book, and I don’t want to speak for her. She, actually, when she talks about it, there are other things that she found to be the coolest things she learned, but for me it was the vision tracking research where when you compel people to read, they go, “Word, word, word,” and you’re watching their eyes, the eye tracking, they go, “Word, word, word, word. Period.”

And then they pause at the period. It’s this thing very creatively called the period pause effect, which is that people pause at the period, and they just sit there, and you may not even notice it, I don’t notice it. I didn’t notice it since I read this stuff. But when you read, you’re just like, you pause there to make sure that you get what the idea was. And very often, you have to go backwards and reread. And that’s because the sentence was kind of complex, and you didn’t really get it. So, it’s cognitively taxing, it requires a lot of effort to read complicated writing with unfamiliar long words. That’s problem one. So, that means people are going to quit in the middle of it.

Two, it’s totally inaccessible to a very large fraction of people when we write in ways that are difficult to read. So, the median United States adult, that means the 50th percentile or if you rank order them on the reading ability, reads like a 9th grade reading level. So, when we write in ways that are complex, we’re inaccessible, unreadable to a large fraction of people. But even to those who are able to read it, the audience that is able to read these complex sentences with unfamiliar uncommon words, for them it’s cognitively taxing, and they’re just more likely to give up and move on.

So, the idea is, again, the easier we make it, the more effective it is, the kinder it is to our reader because we’re making it faster for them and less depleting. It’s also more accessible and inclusive because more people can read our stuff.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, when we talk about long sentences and big words, any particular numbers or rules of thumb you have in mind?

Todd Rogers

No.

Pete Mockaitis

“Twelve words max.”

Todd Rogers

Yes, make it as easy as possible for your reader, and that honestly depends on context, and it depends on what the expectations are. I work with people who write intelligence assessments in the intelligence committee. And I was working with somebody who said that their reports have to be 20 pages, that’s the norm.

You can’t write it shorter than that without looking like you didn’t do your job. And so, okay, well, you can’t make it short. You can make it easier to read so you can write with shorter, more common sentences and words. You can also make it skim-able, which I’m sure we’ll get to as the third – make it easy to jump around.

Pete Mockaitis

Maybe pictures?

Todd Rogers

Yes, if pictures convey it more easily to your reader, then great. Everything is through the lens of, “How do I make it easier for the reader?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. So, next stop, you’ve got design for easy navigation.

Todd Rogers

Oh, right on. We just cued that one up. Nice. I think it flows naturally, design for easy navigation. The idea is – this is going to sound like an absurd sentence but Jessica and I are arguing we focus when writing too much on our writing. And, really, if we take seriously that people are jumping around and they’re skimming and they’re moving on before they even get the main point, then we should design our writing like a map to give headings and guideposts to let people know what’s here, what’s there, and it allows them to jump around and find the parts that they want to dive into and read more closely, and then pop back up like a map, and then navigate.

We’ve run some experiments where we add headings or not to a multi-paragraph message. And in one experiment we ran, it was six paragraphs, maybe seven paragraphs, and we inserted headings or we didn’t after every two paragraphs. Then we looked at whether anyone read anything or acted on anything after the second paragraph, basically after the headings. More than doubled the likelihood of the people got past the second paragraph.

And the idea is just that a sensible person, optimizing with their limited time, for how best they are going to use their next second as they’re navigating their to-do list. If they can’t figure it out, it looks like a wall of text, they’re going to look at it, maybe jump around, and then give up, unless it’s super important to them, in which case, they’ll devote more time. But adding structure, making it easy for people to skim makes it easier for busy readers to get through what we’re writing to them, and helps us be more effective.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, this is bringing me back, talking about easy navigation and the next step, we’re talking about formatting, use enough formatting but no more as your rule of thumb. I’m reminded of back in the day, making a lot of slides at Bain & Company, there was a phenomenon which I kind of thought was fun where they had selective bolding. It’s like customers who had their service requests met the first time were 87% more satisfied, and that part is bolded.

And so, I always read it in my head that way. It’s like, “I’m reading normal words, and now these are bold.” And I thought it was cool because, from a visual perspective, if you were to – we’re talking about skimming – if you were to glance at the slide and read 15% of the words, the bolded ones you will get, “Oh, okay, get it done the first time is a huge deal. Okay, cool. And so, there we have it. Thank you for your selective bolding.”

Todd Rogers

I love it. And Bain is awesome at this. I’m sure if you were a consultant at Bain, you probably went through the training in the first couple of weeks where you each had to make a voicemail and an email, and this is part of their onboarding process. They’re awesome at it. You talked about the selective bolding. I think it makes sense to talk both about design for easy navigation and use formatting judiciously or carefully together.

And the idea is, “How do we make it easier for readers?” And, in this case, what structure and components of structure do we add to our writing? So, here’s one that I love. It’s not going to be formatting but it’s part of designing. I love the bottom line upfront that the US Army uses. It’s called BLUF. For any veteran listening, and I don’t know if you’re a veteran, Pete, but they’re amazing at communications in the army.

And they have a regulation, literally, like a formal reg that demands that any writing in the US Army, first sentence is the bottom line, bottom line upfront. So, if you’re a general writing to an enlisted person, or an enlisted person writing to a general, everyone knows where the bottom line is, it’s the first line. And so, it completely makes it easy to skim. It also disambiguates. That’s a word, we’re talking about writing, so it’s easy.

It also just makes it clear to everybody how we write in our group. And that is especially helpful for lower-status people. Like, an enlisted person writing to a general, completely understandably without clear guidance, would write something like, “You know, I admire your work and we once ran into each other in the mess together. You may not remember me, I’m also from Wisconsin . I just wanted to see if we could have a meeting next week,” as opposed to now, it’s like, “Meeting next week.”

I love that, that makes it easy for readers because they have rules and norms and, in this case, regulations about how we write. That won’t work for everybody because different organizations and different people have different expectations about what a message is supposed to look like. If I wrote you a message like that, where the first line is

“Pete, it was so fun being on the pod. Thanks for having me. I wonder if maybe you could’ve asked this question differently?” and then whatever. Very different than if I was like, “You should’ve asked…” you see having clear norms on how we write. Your question was about formatting and the selective bolding that people at Bain and other places use.

What Jessica and I found is that, in a bunch of surveys, people interpret bold, underline, and highlight as the writer telling the reader, “This is the most important content in this text.” And so, it’s incredible at getting people to read whatever those words are. We do these experiments where we have a sentence that we’re really interested in, and we test people afterwards if they read it.

And when it’s not bolded or underlined or highlighted, nobody reads it, half the people read it because it’s midway through the document they’re reading. And then when you bold, underline, or highlight it, everybody reads it. And so, okay, it’s really powerful, people interpret it the way you would expect they interpret it.

So, then what we do is we use bold, underline, or highlight to draw attention to a different sentence that’s near the one we care about, and everybody reads that other sentence, and it induces, it causes a bunch of people to skip the rest of the text. Because everyone is going fast, and when you tell them, “This is the most important sentence,” it licenses those who are really short on time to just skip everything else, “I got the key information. Got it. Thanks. Ready to move on.”

And so, again, so much of this, there’s tradeoffs. You have to be really careful because people interpret you as serious when you say, “This is the most important thing,” and it licenses them to not read the rest of it.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. So, it’s very effective, it’s so effective it’s dangerous because if you use it wrong, you’re missing out, “You read the thing I bolded instead of everything. And, actually, oopsies, I didn’t bold the thing that I really, really needed you to read.”

Todd Rogers

You got it. Exactly. Again, like so much of this, these are powerful tools as long as we use them well but they also can go awry.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Another principle you have is tell readers why they should care.

Todd Rogers

It’s a pretty straightforward one.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s the first quarter of every nonfiction business book.

Todd Rogers

Of course.

Pete Mockaitis

“This is the most important idea ever.”

Todd Rogers

That’s right, yeah. So, you’re right, and it’s the title of your podcast How to be Awesome at Your Job. Because we are obsessed with randomized experiments, I’ll just show you an illustration. Rock the Vote is an organization that recruits, that gets young people to register to vote, often by having volunteers go to concerts. And they did this experiment where they were asking potential volunteers to volunteer.

And in one case, the subject line was, “Volunteer to register voters,” because from the Rock the Vote perspective, that’s the point. The main idea for Rock the Vote is, “We’re getting people to volunteer to register voters.” They did another condition where they said, “Go to concerts for free while registering voters. Go to free concerts while registering voters.”

From a reader’s perspective, that’s a thing they would care about a little bit more. If you focus on what the writer cares about, it’s, “I’m trying to get people to volunteer to register voters.” But from the reader’s standpoint, “Go to a Beyonce concert and register voters” is an entirely different thing. And so, what they found was when they focused on what the reader cared about, they 4X’d registrations.

And the idea is, like you said, it’s the beginning of every nonfiction business books, it’s the title of your podcast, it’s outrageously important and too easily overlooked that when we write we focus on why we care about the thing, and that’s all I care about. As Jessica and I were writing this book, Writing for Busy Readers, we are trying to help writers be more effective at achieving their goals.

In the process, whatever is necessary from the writer’s perspective being the message, we should review that and elevate the parts that we think the reader might care most about because that’ll capture more of their attention, be more likely to motivate them to read and respond.

Pete Mockaitis

It is a tendency. That is, writers talk about what they care about, what they’re into, and then neglect sort of the audience first all the time. And I think I was guilty of that and it was Nick Morgan’s book Give Your Speech, Change the World that really landed it for me in my early days of keynoting, like, “You must start the journey from why to how.”

But I love how so much, it’s so exciting to me, I almost just assume, “Well, of course, we all want to accomplish great things in an organization, and have cool relationships and culture and have fun, and get things, so I don’t even need to mention that. I could just get right into the super cool tactics I discovered,” and that is just wrong.

I have learned the hard way you must tell readers why they should care, or listeners why they should care. Nick Morgan is right. You’re right. And legions of nonfiction business books, publishers, and editors, are not wrong. I might advocate that they shorten the why case a little bit in many of these books, but it absolutely needs to be there.

Todd Rogers

I’ll plus one that shortening part.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Now, let’s hear about make responding easy.

Todd Rogers

Make responding easy is for those of your listeners, and you, who have followed behavioral science. Make responding easy is just about the essence of the greatest hits of behavioral science. If we reduce friction, we simplify processes, if we prepopulate forms, if we make it really easy to figure out what the key information is, people are more likely to get it and respond to it.

Jessica and I have this mantra, “If it’s important for us the writers, make it easy for them the readers.” That’s the thing. If it’s important for us, we want to make it easy for them. Here’s an incredibly micro example that may be familiar to you, and it is way too familiar to me, which is a group email or group text of, “Let’s find the time to meet.” And I’ll often initiate and be like, “Here are six times that work for me over the next two weeks.”

The next person will, verbatim, actually say, “The second and third work for me, possibly the fifth and maybe the sixth.” And then the chain dies. And the idea is that any reader, first, needs to understand what they’re trying to say, but even if they do understand what they’re trying to say, then they need to go, like, keep in mind, first, second, maybe fourth, fifth, and then go back down to mine and see which ones are they referring to, and back and forth.

If it was actually important to you, if you want to make it easy, you’d say, “Time X, Y, and Z work for me. I could do whatever after Z. We’ll call it A, and then go in reverse order.” And like you actually repost them. And the idea is just if we really want to make it easy, if we want people to respond, we’d make it easy, which is instead of having them navigate to figure out what’s going on, you pull it all in one place.

That’s a trivial example. A really important example is…have everybody followed the…anybody remembers in 2000, there was a guy running for president named Al Gore, who’s running against another guy named George W. Bush? And it turns out, it’s one of the closest elections, maybe one of the closest elections in the US history.

Florida swung the vote and it came down to a couple hundred votes. And it turns out that in Florida, there was this thing called the butterfly ballot, not the one that went to the Supreme Court, for anyone who is conflating everything involving that election. It was a ballot that was extraordinarily complicated. I teach it in my class. It was just really hard to follow what button you’re supposed to push to vote for which person.

I’m not even going to try to describe it to you. Like, look it up, butterfly ballot from 2000. But by making it not easy, and it was actually designed by a Democrat who presumably might’ve preferred Al Gore, but it was a Democrat who, in good faith, was trying to help older people be able to read it. So, in order to have giant font, then you’d use both sides of the page. And then to figure out what button to push, it just became like comical how complex it was.

And they think that that led to something like 5- to 10,000 net votes for George W. Bush by accident because people are, like, typed the wrong button because nobody can make sense of it. I say that only as like an extreme example of, like I was talking about, getting people to schedule a meeting. I also want to show, sometimes, this matters for important things too.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s powerful as an example and it cuts through the core of why, “Why does it matter if one is awesome at their job?” The consequences are massive, it’s like, “Someone was not so awesome at designing that ballot, and now we may never know who ‘should’ have gotten elected because of what went down with a butterfly ballot in Florida.”

Todd Rogers

Look it up and get ready to laugh/cry. Just amazing. I didn’t even realize it until we started writing this book because I got it confused with these hanging chads, for those of you who lived through it.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yes, and I’m all about making responding easy, or making whatever behavior you want to occur easy. And this is kind of BJ Fogg Tiny Habits. We had him talking about that in terms of your own personal behavioral design, as well as in your communication. And I hope, Todd, you had an easy time scheduling this interview, collecting the guest FAQ page, and then the scheduling. And we did not have to have any communication whatsoever, in fact.

Todd Rogers

No, it was super easy. That’s the idea, right? Like, you made it so like here. I think you used Calendly or something like that, and it was just like, “Here are some availability. Just choose one.” It was not 17 back and forth emails to find the time that work for us. I’ll go with a more practical one for people who are trying to be awesome at their jobs.

It is estimated that Amazon’s 1-Click purchasing generates billions of dollars in net revenue relative to before they literally patented 1-Click shopping. And the idea is just reducing steps, makes people more likely to follow through. And in that case, it was increasing sales. In the part we’re talking about in the election, it’s swinging the fate of the Republic.

Pete Mockaitis

And I’d heard that they have, in fact, parted with millions of dollars in legal fees defending and enforcing this intellectual property against infringement, like this is dearly precious to them.

Todd Rogers

Yeah, and I don’t think anyone ever had thought that it would be better to buy things with one click instead of five. Like, really, the genius was with coming up with that idea. Who could have ever thought that one? No one could’ve thought of it prior to the geniuses at Amazon, thinking of it. I’m being sarcastic in case anyone was trying to figure that out.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, certainly, just like in general, when things are easier, you get that result. I’m thinking about, occasionally, someone needs to be paid via a cheque. Like, I think I was getting some carpets, I was like, “Oh, a cheque, huh? Well, that’s going to be a while. I got to figure out where that thing is, where the envelopes are, where the stamps are. And now I just really kind of don’t want to because I was ready to go click, click, click. Here’s your money. Thanks for the carpet. But now it might be a good week or two before I get all these components together for you.”

Todd Rogers

Right. And then, honestly, it’s a minute and a half of work but you’re still not going to do it. And it’s no animus. It’s just you’re human and it seems like it’s a pain, and I’d rather watch another episode on Netflix.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, these are powerful principles. Can you tell us are there any specific do’s, don’ts, words, phrases that you also want to make sure to mention beyond these broad principles?

Todd Rogers

The TLDR version of the book, the too-long-didn’t-read version of the book, and of all this work, is that if we make it easy for our readers, they’ll be more likely to read, respond, and understand. It’s also just kinder to them to write in a way that makes it easy for them. That’s the big picture. How you then do that? How do you make it easier for the reader? That’s what the book is about.

And if you can put on the show notes, we have a one-pager, a checklist if people want it. I also, on our website, with a computer science colleague, we trained GPT4 on the principles, and then tuned it for email, so it was pre-imposed with edits, and it’s incredibly good at rewriting your emails so that they’re actually skim-able using the principles, and so you can find that on our website, WritingForBusyReaders.com.

And there’s a Chrome extension and also people use it for their Gmail and stuff. The idea is it turns out the AI tools, the LLMs are very good at learning and internalizing the principles, and with examples, can get better at applying them.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, that’s a plug-in that we use or a series of prompts we feed it?

Todd Rogers

No, it’s just on our website. You can paste an email, hit click, and then it outputs what it would look like if it were written according to these principles. And what’s cool, it’s like a teaching tool. It also is really useful just because these are good ideas but I love it as it brings to life, instead of this, like, “I don’t know how I would apply that to this.” It just makes suggestions, “Well, turn this into a bulleted list. I would start this as a separate paragraph. I would simplify this.” And it doesn’t say these things, it just does them, “I would simplify this sentence.” And the I, I was personifying our AI overlord.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, we tend to do that. All right. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Todd Rogers

There’s this body of work that has just started over the last few years called subtraction neglect, which is that when you ask people to improve anything, this woman Gabe Adams and collaborators at University of Virginia did it. You ask people to improve something, “Improve this itinerary for a trip to Washington, D.C.,” “Improve this short essay,” “Improve this Lego construction item,” people are massively biased towards adding things and we just fail to think to even subtract things.

And there’s this tendency across categories that if we want to improve things, we add. And very often, we can improve, as Jessica and I talked about in writing, we can improve by subtracting but it’s just something that doesn’t naturally or easily come to people’s minds. It’s incredible. It’s really cool research by Gabe Adams and collaborators called subtraction neglect.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah, Leidy Klotz had a book talking along those lines. We had him on the show and, yes, that was thought-provoking. Okay.

Todd Rogers
Yes, Leidy is a co-author on our work.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Todd Rogers

I don’t know about my life favorite but my favorite recent book is called Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka. She founded Code for America. She was the first Chief Digital Officer of the US. And her big thesis that complexity favors the sophisticated, that we have all these government agencies that have these complex systems that are unnecessarily complex, for reasons that are both often policy-driven, and we act like it’s actually implementation, people who are implementing, implement what the policy says, and we should be redesigning policy because, downstream, that leads to actually better use of technology.

But I love the last third of the book is about how complexity favors the sophisticated, which means that when we have complex processes, we deter not randomly, we deter the least sophisticated, the most harried, possibly and often for government services the most who would benefit from some of these things. But we have often, processes that are unnecessarily complex. Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite tool?

Todd Rogers

I’m going to name two. One is pretty basic and the other is pretty frontier. The basic one, I love my Google Keep, which is just a to-do list keeper that is social and I can share with my wife and family members, and so we update the to-do list. It’s so basic and central to our lives. The more sophisticated, and also your listeners are going to think I’m pretty basic, I love using ChatGPT in all of my life, and I love using GPT4, the underlying tech in some of the apps that we’ve made, because I probably use it several times a day in all sorts of creative ways from editing things I’m writing to generating ideas, to coming up with study materials.

The other day I had it generate descriptions of flowers that might grow on Mars because we’re doing a silly study on what kinds of names people like. So, from both basic, but one is medium to low tech, which is the Google Keep, to the ChatGPT, which everybody would say, but I love the underlying LLM of GPT4, and Bard, and all of LLMs for now. And, again, I just want our AI overlords to know I’m naming them as my favorite.

Pete Mockaitis

And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Todd Rogers

WritingForBusyReaders.com. It has the checklist, the one-page checklist for the principles of how to write more effectively for busy people. It also has the editing AI editing tool for your emails. And it also has a lot of other resources that’s great, like substitution ideas for instead of saying, “The reason is…” you can say “Because…” and there’s a whole set of thousands of word pairs, and you just never use this phrase, always use this one because it’s more concise and more direct. But www.WritingForBusyReaders.com.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Todd Rogers

Yeah. We write all the time. We are all writers. Whether it’s Slack messages, emails, text messages, proposals, reports, we write all the time. We should edit. At a round of editing, whenever we are writing anything, where we ask ourselves, “How do I make it easier for my reader?” How to do that is going to depend on the context, and that’s what Jessica and I have really focused on.

But when you do that, when you edit through the lens of making it easier for the reader, you will be more effective at achieving the goals you have for whatever it is you are writing. In the process, it’s also just kinder to your reader.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Todd, this beautiful stuff. Thank you and I wish you much good writing.

Todd Rogers

Thanks for having me, Pete. This was fun.