Writing for Busy Readers
Communicate More Effectively in the Real World
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- ¥1,800
Publisher Description
Writing well is for school. Writing effectively is for life.
Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink offer the most valuable practical writing advice today. Building on their own research in behavioral science, they outline cognitive facts about how people actually read and distill them into six principles that will transform the power of your writing:
Less is moreMake reading easyDesign for easy navigationUse enough formatting, but no moreTell readers why they should careMake responding easyIncluding many real-world examples, a checklist and other tools, this guide will make you a more successful and productive communicator. Rogers and Lasky-Fink bring Strunk and White’s core ideas into the twenty-first century’s attention marketplace.
When the influential guides to writing prose were written, the internet hadn’t been invented. Now, the average American adult is inundated with digital messages each day. With all this correspondence, capturing a busy reader’s attention is more challenging than ever. This is how to do it.
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.
