AEE 2055: Harvard Professor Todd Rogers on 3 Ways to Write Well for a Busy World

This is an All-Ears English Podcast episode 2055. Harvard professor Todd Rogers on Three Ways to Write Well for a Busy World. Welcome to the All-Ears English Podcast, downloaded more than 200 million times. We believe in connection, not perfection. With your American host, Lindsay McMahon, and today's featured guest coming to you from Denver, Colorado, USA. To get real-time transcripts right on your phone and create your personalized vocabulary list, try the All-Ears English app for iOS and Android. Start your seven-day free trial at allyoursenglish.com, board slash app. Writing well is for school, but writing effectively is for life. In today's episode, our guest, Todd Rogers, from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, gives us evidence-based tips on how to write well, not for school, but for life, especially in a busy world. Welcome, Todd, to All-Ears English. How are you today? I'm good. Highlandsy. Well, I'm excited to have you on the show. I love having guests to get new ideas into the show for our listeners all over the world. Guys, I would like to start off today's episode with a bio from Todd Rogers. So today in the show, I have Todd Rogers. Todd is a professor of public policy at Harvard University in the Kennedy School of Government. He's the co-author of writing for busy readers, and he has trained thousands of leaders across hundreds of organizations on the science of writing for those busy readers. We'll talk about that in a second. Todd has received his PhD jointly from Harvard's Department of Psychology and the Harvard School of Business. By the way, Todd, I love combining psychology and business. Why did you decide to go in that direction of combining the two? Well, I was really interested in how we can change behavior and it turns out that that's across lots of fields. And so I think it is the scientific behavior change, helping people be more effective and in the process make better choices. I love it. I love it. So today we're talking about writing effectively, and I want to call out a quote from our email exchange back and forth that I thought was interesting, and I think we'll be a little bit provocative for our audience because we assume that when we go to school, we learn things for life. So here's the quote, you said, writing well is for school, but writing effectively is for life. So can you tell me what you meant by that? First of all, before we go into your core tips? Sure, yeah, I think it's really this key insight that Jessica Lasky faked my co-author on this work and I had is that when we are taught how to write, we are taught how to write so that people who are reading it sentenced by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, from top to bottom, carefully fully understand what we mean and we are being clear. But it turns out no one in the world reads like that. Yes. And so writing well is different than writing effectively, and that's what this all is work is about. That's what this is about. And have you seen a real shift in, I'm not sure how long you've been at Harvard Kennedy School or just in your studies and your work and your research? Have you seen, when did this shift? Was it with blogging, was it with the internet? When did people stop reading top to bottom and the full article? When did we start just kind of grabbing the low hanging fruit and running away with that? I see, I don't know that there's some specific moment of shift. I think everyone is busy and it's possible or more busy now, but everyone is busy and when they read what we write, their goal is to move on as quickly as possible, often without understanding what we were writing. I love that. That is such an important piece of knowledge. So what we're saying is writing has to kind of be reinvented for the real world. If we want to have success really in any field, of course, unless we're writing academic journals and papers, that obviously is different, but I imagine many other things in life we need to be concise. So let's get into writing well, Todd. Could you give us for listeners three core tips on how to write well now in the real world? Sure, OK, so the first, we say, designed for easy navigation, which is when we are writing, we need to be aware that our readers are skimming and jumping around all over the place. And so if we design our writing to make it easy for people to jump around and find what they want, they end up being more likely to read it. So for example, using headings, we've run randomized experiments with 50,000 people where a six paragraph message, if you add a heading every two paragraphs, it more than double the likelihood they read past the first couple paragraphs. OK, using heading. So let's tie this to a context of where this tip will work. I'm imagining blogs, but I'm sure there are more places that you're imagining to use this particular advice. What should we, how should we think of this as a what kind of container? So design for navigation, it could be the idea is that people are skimming. And so it could be in an email where you put similar ideas next to each other to make it easy for skimmers to find related ideas. Headings is one sub part of it, but the idea is, instead of thinking about our writing as a series of words, it is also a visual thing that people are jumping around on. And how do you make it easier for people who are jumping around? It could be reports. I work with companies and organizations that they're one-pagers and they're executive summaries and they're full reports. Adding more structure makes it easier for people to jump around, also in emails. Like putting similar ideas next to each other and dissimilar apart, making key information immediately visible. Like in the US Army, they have a thing called bluff. Bottom line up front. Love that. Yep, don't bury the lead. Yeah, exactly. And it works in the Army because a general writing to enlisted people, enlisted people writing to a general, all write the same way. But in the real world, that actually doesn't always work because it could become off as rude or too direct if you start with your first sentence being exactly what I want from you. OK, OK. So we need to do other things to design. To assume, yes, we're going to move into the email or the blog post or the piece of writing. How much of this becomes redundant, right? When I write an email, sometimes if I'm putting everything in bold, underlining everything, I hit that point of, now, nothing is highlighted or designed for skimming. Where's that cutoff point? Let's say in an email. Oh, yeah, in an email, we've run all these experiments where people interpret bold, underlying, and highlight as the writer saying, this is the most important content. Yes. And one thing that is a cool implication of that is that it makes it way more likely they read that content. Yes. But it also makes them way less likely to read everything else. That's right. And so using these things carefully, because there's trade-offs, we have also run studies where you highlight lots of things or you vote lots of things. It decreases the likelihood that any one of them gets read. Of course. Everything's become redundant. Yeah, yeah. So would you recommend in an email to limit yourself then using this principle? Number one, your first tip, design for skimming to one core idea in any given email, let's say. I think email is the best context to use for this today for our listeners. Yeah. OK. So in an email, I think, if we wanted to focus on email, I want to drop this one. I can read it. OK. Can we do it over? Because I do think that if we can add in an outtod, it's OK. We can broaden it out. Where do you see this being most useful then? Designing for navigation for skimmers is useful in every form of read, whether it's an email where we are aware that the single request we have is going to get lost if it's in the second and third paragraph. So we may pull it out and separate it visually. Or we have multiple ideas. We want to add structure to it. Or a report where we add structure to make it easy for people to skim and figure out exactly what they want. The idea is writing for skimmers. And it's idiosyncratic. It varies by context and person. But the idea is everyone skimming is we want to design to make it easy for skimmers. I love it. So design for skimming. Just that new way of consuming material. That is now what we do. We no longer read. We skim. Awesome. Todd, what would be your second tip for writing well today in life, not in academia? So the second would be less is more, which I've heard you talk about and everyone talks about. And one of the things that has really resonated as we've done hundreds of randomized experiments on this is that in the past, typically people fight over what is they think style. They think it's a preference and a choice that how should we write is taste. But it turns out that when you use more words, fewer people read. When you add or requests, you ask for two things instead of one. You decrease the likelihood anyone will respond to any of it. When you add additional ideas, you decrease the likelihood that any of the ideas get through, but more get through to those who read it. So it's just a constant tradeoff. The more you add, the fewer people who are going to read it. Yeah, it's so hard though sometimes, isn't it? Really just saying one thing instead of five things, it's a constant battle to kind of home in and say, this is exactly what I need to get across. The one most important thing. Do you find that difficult in your writing? I do. I do. I do. I mean, one thing that we, in my research lab, the rule is no email can be more than four sentences. And the way we do it is we say the first sentence is some acknowledgement of warmth and humanity. Lindsay, it was great talking to you on that pod. Thanks for having me on. Second, you asked me for more of the research on how adding more decreases the quality and likelihood of people reading. See below or see attached for more information on that. If you have any questions, let me know. And so then basically it just makes it so that there's no way the recipient will lose track of what exactly you're saying. I love it. It's refreshing. And it allows you to add as much as you want. But it's just, it's somewhere else. And they can go to it when they're ready for it. Right. And keeping one email to one topic too is refreshing, right? Because then the people, well, I know I do this. This is not a great thing to do. But I use my email inbox as kind of a task list. I know you shouldn't do it, but I do. And so having just one idea tied to one subject line and one actionable item is convenient for me as a consumer of those emails. Yeah, if you're getting 100 emails a day, most of the things coming in, what do you think? That's exactly right for me. But we ran a survey of professionals on this. And it turns out that if we ask them, would you rather have three items that you have to do? Three requests in one email or in three separate emails. And it sounds like Lindsay, you and me are both, I'd rather have three separate messages. Because my inbox is my to do list. It turns out that 75% of people prefer it in one. Weird. OK, I'm surprised by that. But obviously, this is like, this is one of the takeaways from when we teach this. Is there aren't what's universal as everyone is busy and everyone is skimming? And if you, and this is real like we should have real communication with the people that we regularly communicate with, how would you like to receive this? I work with schools. And like, would you like it by text message or email or print it form? And then this is where like actual communication with the people who are important to us, we can make it easier for them and more effective for us. That's a great point, Todd. So it's really about personalizing it to that person. If you want to get work done with people, right? If you want to work in a silo, work on your own, maybe you can have things the way you want them, but we're never working alone. I were always collaborating, especially in academia, I would imagine you are. So what would be your third tip then? So so far, our tips are designed for skimming and then keep in mind that less is more. So Todd, what would be the third thing that we need to know to write well? Make responding easy and by that, here's the like high or the high goal of all this work. I want everyone when they write to have a round of edit where they ask themselves, how do I make it easier for the reader? And if you make it easier for the reader, it's more effective, it's kinder to them because it saves them time. It's like, it's a waste of their time and attention if it's harder to read than it needs to be. And it's more inclusive and accessible. It's just easier to read. And so one of those is like, make responding easy. If I'm asking you and we had an email exchange about this, let's find a time. I could say, that sounds great. When is good for you? Right. Now, there's a 72% chance I made up that number, but there's like some chance that that's going to be 12 emails back and forth and that's going to take us a month. And sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, sorry, go ahead, Todd, keep going. No, like it. And so in whatever we're doing, the fewer steps we require the people to take, the more likely they are to do it. And so if we want you to respond, make it easy to know what the request is and make it not general, make it specific. If it's asking for a time, propose a bunch. If there's a whole chain of people who say, oh, the first and second time work for me, someone's like, only the third and first work, if you really want that last person to respond, consolidate it, make it easy. If people are more likely to respond, if it's easy. I love that. Yeah, and maybe take the next step and create a poll, right? It's easy enough to use programs to create a poll just to make it easy. You know, it's really interesting that you said that because I know my mindset. Usually I, when I collaborate with guests on the podcast or really for any meeting, I will provide those times. But the times when I say when works for you is when I'm feeling tired or I'm feeling a little lazy. And I know that's not serving the person on the other end. I'm asking them to take on the burden and that does create an extra five or six emails potentially, right? And so I love this. So it's always stepping into the shoes of the person who's receiving this. It's kind of a level of empathy that I feel like we should be going through our work lives every day thinking about who's on the receiving end, right? But for some reason, maybe we just get so kind of involved with our work. Why do we forget about this? I think that our writing, we love our writing. We put a lot of effort into it. And it's really hard to purge. So it's hard to cut. And it's obvious that if it's important to me, it's gonna be important to you. So I assume you're gonna read it carefully and put the effort in. So like here's the one that happens all the time. We're communicating across time zones. And I say, what about one o'clock? Oh my gosh. And it's like, do you mean Eastern time or Greenwich mean time or? Oh, you nailed it. And so like if I was really trying to make it easy for you, I'd say all Eastern time. I'd say, what about the following times? All Eastern time or whatever. But the idea is just like you're saying, like take their perspective and try and make it easier for your reader because it makes your message you're writing more effective and it's kinder. Yeah, you hit on my biggest pet peeve, right? Is by assuming for some reason, we're all in the same time zone. We're never in the same time zone, right? We do a lot of work globally. I'm in mountain time, which no one really knows what that time zone is. But working with the coasts. And so yes, so that goes back to the empathy. Make it easy. Immediately either tell them the time zone you're working in or translate it to a more well-known time zone. I love it. Any final tips, any overall tips you want to leave are listeners with today, Todd. We talked about everyone is skimming. So you want to design to make it easier for skimmers. Yes. Less is more because the more you add, the more effort is required of your reader. And it just makes them less likely to engage and even catch the key information. And the third is make responding easy because the easier we make it, the more likely someone is to respond. So like the high level take away is the easier, we should write to make it easy for our readers. It's nice to them. It's disrespectful to not do it that way because we are wasting their time. But it's also makes us much more effective at achieving our goals, which is we have some goal that we're trying to convey. And so make it easy for our readers. That's the big, that's the big takeaway. I love it. That is so good. So hopefully our listeners will take this advice today. Take a look at their emails. Guys, look at your emails. See what you're doing. Are you actually making it easy for that person to get back to you? Make a couple changes as Todd has suggested today and see what happens. Todd, can you tell us about your book that's coming out in, I believe, early September? Yes, it's called Writing for Busy Readers. It's co-authored with Jessica Lasky-Fink. And it's based on the science of hundreds of experiments that we and others have done on the six principles and how you write. So busy people are more likely to read and respond. And the TLDR version, the too long didn't read version. Everyone is busy. And everyone is skimming what we write. And so we need to write in a way that reflects the reality of how they read. And the high level point is, this is how to make it easy for our readers. So good. So good. Where can our listeners find that? Where should they go to learn more about you to learn where they could find the book? So the book is coming out September 5, but it's able to be pre-ordered now. You probably best places to go to the website, writing forbusyreaders.com. Writing forbusyreaders.com. And we've all sorts of resources. We have a grade level, like you can paste things and it's a grade level reading. Sort of evaluate how difficult it is to read. We also have an AI tool that we train on AI tool to edit your writing. So that it applies these principles to show you what that looks like. Oh, super interesting. I love it. Well, thank you for coming on the show and these useful tips. Again, I think our listeners are going to have immediate value out of today's episode and be able to implement this right away. Thanks again, Todd. Nice to meet you. It's great being on here. Thanks, Lindsay. Take care, bye. Thanks for listening to all ears English. Would you like to know your English level? Take our two-minute quiz. Go to all earsenglish.com forward slash fluency score. And if you believe in connection, not perfection, then hit subscribe now to make sure you don't miss anything. See you next time.