Writing for Busy Readers
communicate more effectively in the real world
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
We were all taught the fundamentals of writing well in school. But how do we write effectively in today’s hyper-interactive world?
When The Elements of Style and On Writing Well were published in 1959 and 1976, the internet hadn’t been invented. Since then, there has been a radical transformation in how we communicate. The average adult receives over 100 emails and tens of text messages each day. With all this correspondence, gaining a busy reader’s attention is now a competition.
Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink, both behavioural scientists, offer practical writing advice you can use today. They begin by outlining cognitive facts about how busy people read, then detail six research-backed principles for effective writing:
Including many examples, a checklist, and other tools for the most effective writing, this handbook will make you a more effective communicator. Rogers and Lasky-Fink bring conventional ideas about text-based communication into the 21st century’s radically transformed attention marketplace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rogers, a public policy professor at Harvard University, and Lasky-Fink, research director at Harvard's People Lab, debut with a useful handbook on how to efficiently get one's point across, whether in an email, work memo, or social media post. The authors propose "six principles of effective writing": "less is more," "make reading easy," "design for easy navigation," "use enough formatting, but no more," "tell readers why they should care," and "make responding easy." To make reading easy, the authors recommend sticking to "short and common" words, and to let readers know why they should care, the authors suggest specifying the intended audience early in the piece. Each principle draws on research findings illuminating how readers engage with texts. For example, the authors emphasize the importance of concision by describing a study that found employees at a consulting firm "responded more quickly to shorter, more focused emails than to longer ones." They also encourage writers to "order ideas by priority," noting that "the first item in a list usually gets the most attention" and relating a study that found a political candidate earns a larger share of the vote when their name appears higher up on a ballot. The thoughtful advice is pragmatic and the prose fittingly concise and straightforward. It's Strunk & White for the internet age.
