How to Write for Busy Readers: Why Less Is More with Todd Rogers
Welcome to Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Todd Rogers.
Todd is revolutionizing how we think about written communication. His research at Harvard Kennedy School has transformed everything from political campaigns to corporate communications. But that's not all – he's also the co-founder of EveryDay Labs and the Analyst Institute, applying rigorous science to real-world challenges.
In this episode, we explore the counterintuitive findings from Todd's experiments and how his latest book, Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World, provides a science-backed roadmap for anyone who wants their words to actually matter. From emails that get responses to presentations that drive action, Todd's research reveals why less truly is more.
Through randomized experiments involving millions of people, Todd has discovered that our assumptions about effective writing are often completely wrong. His work shows that deleting sentences can double response rates, that formatting choices dramatically impact comprehension, and that understanding how people skim can transform your communication effectiveness. These aren't just theories – they're proven strategies that work across industries and contexts.
Please enjoy this remarkable episode, How to Write for Busy Readers: Why Less Is More with Todd Rogers.If you enjoyed this episode of the Remarkable People podcast, please leave a rating, write a review, and subscribe. Thank you!
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Guy Kawasaki:
Hello, my name is Guy Kawasaki. You probably know that by now. I am the host of the Remarkable People Podcast and you'll also probably know that we're on a mission to make you remarkable. So we go all over the world trying to find remarkable people to give us their wisdom and their insight and inspiration, and we found another really remarkable person. His name is Todd Rogers.
Now, before we started recording, we kind of shot the bull a little bit, so I'm already in a really good mood. I've been looking forward to this podcast because we're going to talk about effective writing. So I'm going to read you this bio of him and all his behavioral science and all that. But man, he has written a great book about writing.
And let me tell you something. As the host of this podcast, I need to prepare fifty-two times a year for a guest. Fifty out of the fifty-two times I'm reading a book to prepare. And I got to tell you, I have read more nonfiction books than most people in the world and oh my God, I would like to give everybody a copy of your book, Todd. But then the problem is I was thinking about this, I really considered doing that, but by the time they're on my show, the book is already out so I cannot influence their book.
But anyway, we like to stay focused on this podcast. So let me get to his bio. Todd is a behavioral scientist and a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He applies behavioral science to improve education, democracy, voting and communication, and also K through Twelve attendance.
He has founded two things EveryDay Labs and the Analyst Institute. His research helps people communicate more effectively and make better decisions with fewer words. His latest work, he told me as we were shooting the bull is about maintaining friendships and stuff. So that's another topic I'm very interested in. His latest book published that you can buy right now is called Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. How's that for an introduction, Todd?
Todd Rogers:
That's the best. That beginning part about everyone should read it, etc. I was like, "I wonder if it's too late to add that to the blurb on the paperback."
Guy Kawasaki:
You know what? There are so many things I'm going to ask you about this book because I've written seventeen books. Some people say I wrote one book seventeen times. That's a different discussion. And so I am well versed in writing nonfiction and there are so many things I'm curious about.
But we're going to take a little bit of segue because I want to tap your day job before we get to this book. Okay, so well, even before that, I want to get even more unfocused and I noticed that you thank Bob Cialdini in your acknowledgement. So what did he do for this book? Because he is my hero.
Todd Rogers:
Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you asked about that. When I was in college, I read Influence, his book, the science of persuasion, and as a sophomore in the spring semester in my intro to social psychology. And I was like, "Oh my God, I want to do that. That's what I want to do, that stuff." And then I became a political pollster and realized there was a science of behavior change not used in politics.
And so I ended up going back to grad school in social psychology and then eventually an organizational behavior and all the while admiring this guy and his work. And over the years when I'd see him at conferences, he and I ended up doing a bunch of stuff together. Like a lackey, I would just follow him around and be like, "Hey Bob, can we do something?" Or, "I love this project." Whatever. And I'm embarrassed, but it was amazing.
So we ended up collaborating on what I think will be his last paper and with Jessica, my co-author on this book, and I just gave a talk at his retirement event last month in Arizona, at Arizona State about how, why I became a social. And when he called me to ask to work on this paper with him, I got all choked up and I'm big into which maybe we will talk to or not how to make friends and especially male friendships.
And I leaned into vulnerability and showing emotion and I started crying while giving my talk, talking about it. And normally I would choke it down, but I was like, "You know what? No, I'm doing a service to everybody else." And I got all choked up talking about how important he's been in my life. Yeah, Bob's an inspiration, mentor and friend.
Guy Kawasaki:
Same with me. I think the two biggest academic influences, probably there's three. There's Phil Zimbardo, Carol Dweck, and Bob Cialdini.
Todd Rogers:
I've co-authored with Carol too. I think Zimbardo was before my time, but yeah, those are amazing. That's a great list.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you saying I'm old?
Todd Rogers:
I think people now would say Zimbardo would make their list because he was so influential and such an inspiring scholar.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so now I want to tap your expertise about one thing. How do we increase voter participation and engagement?
Todd Rogers:
The good news is it's really easy. So I can give a succinct answer. I'm being sarcastic. It is not. I worked for a decade, and I co-founded the Analyst Institute, which translates behavioral science and data science into political strategy and ran hundreds of get out the vote experiments, randomizing different messages and different modalities and things like that.
And I think there are two very different answers. One, the candidates, when you have an inspiring motivating candidate, they swamp everything. The most important thing is candidate message timing, which we don't have much control over.
And then on the edges we can increase turnout half a percentage point or one percentage point by being more effective with the ways we allocate money in the messages we use. Which most presidential elections are decided by less than that and lots of congressional elections, so that we only can make improvements on the margins. And I think it's just worth having realistic expectations. That's the short answer.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let me ask the opposite question. So let's suppose that you are from one particular political party and because you're a nutcase asshole, you're trying to discourage people from the other party to vote. So you say, "You cannot give people water, we're going to reduce the polling stations in your area, you got to have an ID", whatever. Do those things also work to do the opposite?
Todd Rogers:
My team ran Obama's experiments team in this reelection, and we bring randomized experiments in behavioral science to politics and that's what they do. Someone asked me once, "Did anyone ever ask us how to suppress turnout rather than how to increase it?" And it had never crossed my mind and I was pretty proud of the people I work with a decade of working on voter turnout.
And no one ever asked me how would we suppress the opposing side's turnout, which I just think is that's a very nice sign. Whether it works. I don't know whether those things, I know that there's been some research on voter ID laws and I think it's mixed because it does two things. It says it's going to be a little bit more friction, but it also signals that people are trying to hold you back. And so that induces some kind of reactance. And so I think that it depends on the study, but the results I think are mixed.
Guy Kawasaki:
So are you saying that I'm the first person in your career to ask how to suppress votes?
Todd Rogers:
If you're asking that in earnest, then yes, if you're asking has anyone ever asked me, then no. People have asked, has anyone ever asked me? And no, it's pretty cool. I think it's not so Machiavellian as it's like win at all costs, at least the people that I work with and that I have worked with in the past. So yes. "Yes, Guy." Next time anyone asks me, "Has anyone ever asked you how to suppress turn out?" I'll be like, "Yeah, there's this guy, Guy."
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm trying to wrap my head around whether that is praise or condemnation. Okay, so now something that I don't think anybody can argue against is you did work about how to reduce K through Twelve absenteeism. So how do you do that? And I'm not suggesting I want to know how to suppress attendance.
Todd Rogers:
That I think is probably way more obvious answers to how to make kids not want to go to school. There's lots of ways to do that. We're incredibly creative at that. I started doing research on how do we engage families, after doing the voting stuff. I had a little fallow period and discovered that I really wanted to figure out how to mobilize social support for kids.
Now that could be mobilizing coaches and ministers and grandparents, but also especially mobilizing parents. And developed a bunch of interventions that we did these randomized experiments in school districts and found that three psychological features.
One is that you want to direct parent attention to something they have agency over, which is like if you remind parents that their kids aren't doing well in school, you may motivate them, but it's not clear they know how to produce better academic performance with more motivation. Attendance is much more straightforward. And so if your kid is missing a lot of school, when you channel parent attention and motivation at that, they have much more agency over that.
The second is they have a bunch of false beliefs about their own kid's attendance. For example, they underestimate their own kid's attendance by a factor of two. So my kid has missed twenty days, I think ten. And then the final is that they don't realize their kid has missed more than their classmates, which is also just kind of this universal thing.
We assume the Lake Wobegon effect, like our kid is better than average. And so the majority of the highest absence kids, their parents think their kid is normal in absenteeism. And when you do these interventions in a cost-effective way, like we've now replicated in more than a dozen separate randomized experiments in schools, we developed a program of intervention that reduces absenteeism at about ten bucks per day generated.
The point is just that it's about fifty times more cost-effective than anything else to reduce absenteeism. And so after some prodding from school districts, we ended up starting this company EveryDay Labs that now works in most of large districts around the country to implement this.
To reduce absenteeism using this sort of communications program that really optimizes the right message at the right time through the right channel to capture as many days of attendance as possible. And so the psychology is really lots of things, but those are the three.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I'm sure you will know what study I'm referring to and who did it. I'm blanking right now what his name was. I actually interviewed him for this Remarkable People Podcast. I also interviewed his wife, he's from the University of Chicago and there was some study about where they paid people to send their kids to school and there was a lot of controversy you shouldn't be paying people to send their kids to school.
Todd Rogers:
Is it Roland Fryer?
Guy Kawasaki:
I cannot remember.
Todd Rogers:
John List?
Guy Kawasaki:
John. It was John. Yeah, as I recall his take on it was, "Listen, the ends justify the means if you pay them and they have better attendance, God bless you, don't be proud."
Todd Rogers:
Yeah. The intervention that we developed is telling parents their kid misses more school than their classmates and we tend to conform to the behavior of others. And so this is the big Cialdini insight. And so it turns out that that ends up being by far the most motivating way to get parents to get their kids to school. But you're saying if we pay kids, there's three problems or concerns with it. One is the ethics.
Do we want to pay kids for something like that? Some people probably have a hang-up on it, I don't. If it works and it's cost-effective and let's do it. The second is it might crowd out intrinsic motivation. "I attend school 160 days a year, I don't get paid for those. You're only worried about the twenty days I miss?"
And then the third is how to do it cost effectively. So most kids only miss not only it's too much, too much, too much, too much. Well the kids miss too much school, but they'll miss fifteen or twenty days, but they'll attend 160 days. And so how do you cost effectively target the marginal day? The incremental day as opposed to compensating for all the days they already would've attended.
Guy Kawasaki:
So now we're going to leave your checkered past and we're going to get to the book because I have so many questions about this book, and we have already burned fifteen minutes. So I told you I read about fifty-two non-fiction books a year and one of the things that I just do not understand is most of these books, especially the ones written by academics, they go four or five, six pages without a heading or subheading.
And it drives me just batshit because I cannot remember on the fourth page, what the hell is this about? So is there some rule that says paragraphs have to have minimum ten sentences and you cannot have a subheading and you cannot use bullets? Why do people do that?
Todd Rogers:
Another question no one has ever asked.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, we are only just beginning, Todd. I hate to tell you.
Todd Rogers:
No, I love it. I know that you're being sarcastic. There's not a secret training guide for how to write in a way that no one will be able to comfortably read. I hope that it's basically the inverse of our book and that we could probably pull it together by doing the inverse.
You're basically saying the writing without an eye towards how people are actually going to read it. That's the objection, right? You're just not helping the reader. You're just writing, and they may be beautiful prose, it's just no one's going to read them.
Guy Kawasaki:
So basically your assumption is that most people are skimmers, right? So talk about skimming.
Todd Rogers:
Yeah, I think boil down the book to everybody is skimming and so given that we should write in a way that accommodates the way people skim because it will make us more effective at actually getting through. And it turns out it's kinder to our readers because I mean you'll appreciate this.
The idea is starting with the reader experience and then working backwards, they're going to skim. So let's write in a way that makes it easier for them, while also providing all the content we want. It just means adding another perspective to the way we write.
Guy Kawasaki:
And do you have a scientific analysis of how people skim? How do they pick out what to read and what to skim and what to rip past?
Todd Rogers:
Yeah, it's great. The eye tracking research where they lock your face in and then they make you read. There's basically three ways people read. They call it scan, skim and read. And scanning is where you're just flipping around, you're looking at pictures, you're looking at headings, you're just orienting. And sometimes that's all we do. Your nonfiction books that you said you read fifty a year. I'm sure many of them you are like, "I already know this section. I'm going to see a way, keep go fast."
That's scanning and then once you're triggered you're like, "That's interesting." Then you jump in and you skim and you're like dart around, but now you're not going up down, you're going left and you're going backwards and you're skipping and then occasionally you're like, "I think I missed the point. It sounds interesting." And then you'll go do the third which is read, which is where you're like, "Now I'm making sure I'm going forward and I'm understanding."
And sometimes, which we'll talk about, but when we write complicated sentences, long convoluted, but grammatically correct. Often people will have to stop at the period, wait for a long time and then realize they have no idea what it was about and then go back and reread it. And the idea is that's just not starting with the reader's experience. If you are starting with the reader's experience, you want them to go through it quickly and fully get the idea and your convoluted sentence doesn't help.
Guy Kawasaki:
But that seems so logical. But why do people write six pages without a heading or subheading or bullet list? Why do they do it? Because they are reading other people's books that way. Why do they write a book like that?
Todd Rogers:
It's obvious in your head you have some specific person in mind. You don't have to share it, but you're like, "Jimmy, why?" I think we write in these complicated ways in part because that's how we were taught to write, and we will get assignments where it has to be at least a certain length in pages.
But now that you're a grownup, you don't get rewarded for length, you get rewarded for effectiveness and length often works against you. I think that part of it is just they're writing because that's how we're taught to write and they're not really adding the layer in of, "How would I adjust this for the reader making it easier for readers."
Guy Kawasaki:
So I'm going to tell you a story that I interviewed someone for this podcast, and I became her friend, pretty close friend, and she sent me the manuscript for her second book, and it had six pages long before there's a heading. Everything I just talked about, right? So I said, "I'm going to do her a favor. I'm going to show her how much better it would be if there were headings."
So I stuck the book in ChatGPT, and I gave a prompt that says, "Read this book, give me subheadings and headings everywhere possible." And ChatGPT, in my humble opinion, did a brilliant job and I sent it to her and there's a whole other side story because she thought that by me putting it into ChatGPT, I had just put all of her IP into the public domain and it was all released. And that's not true. That's not true at all. If you're an author, you can do this.
But anyway, I guess my long-winded question is do you believe that AI can effectively help people literally put your manuscript in there and say, "Break this into sections, give me headings and subheadings and bullets?"
Todd Rogers:
Yes, and I think you can do even better than that. So with a colleague of mine, soon after ChatGPT was released, we made a little tool where we trained it on the checklist that we have for writing for busy readers and then tuned it for pre-post examples of emails and then made it available in all the trainings that I do with organizations and everywhere.
And we had pretty quickly few hundred thousand users, like three or 400,000 users and it still gets used, but it was trained for email and people have lots of writing purposes. And so my wife the other day, about a month ago showed me, if you say, "Write the way, Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink, or edit this the way Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink would edit it for busy readers."
It ends up applying all of our principles because it has already metabolized all of our work and it's even better than anything we did. So great. Good. I'm retiring a little tool. And it's not just headings and bullets, it's also simplifying sentences, subbing in easier words using formatting to reinforce the purpose. And then it coaches you too, which is cool. It'll do it and then it'll tell you what it did.
Guy Kawasaki:
And where do I access this? Because I'm writing another book. I'm going to stick my book in this the moment we hang up.
Todd Rogers:
You can just ask ChatGPT with that prompt, "How would Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink according to their book Writing for Busy Readers." That's proof that it's sort of consumed the book, but good, even better. Even better because it makes it easier for people.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Todd Rogers:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll give you a data point about how OCD I am. So prior to AI, as I was finishing a manuscript, I would search for every word that ended in L-Y because I wanted to hunt down every adverb in my manuscript. I look for every instance of the word very so that if I wrote it's a very dark night, that's a bullshit thing. I look for every instance of the word ‘be’ because I wanted to make everything the active voice.
I look for every instance of the word ‘which’ to see if it should have been that. I call this the ‘which’ hunt and I love doing this. I love editing. Anyway, I'm falling on my sword here. Okay, I'm going to tell you another story, see if this really appalls you. Okay?
Todd Rogers:
Yeah, please.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right, so I get asked once a day for a blurb for a book, once a day. And when I'm in a good mood and I'm not busy and I'm not surfing, which is not too often, but often what I do is I tell the author, "This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to take your manuscript, I'm going to stick it in ChatGPT, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to summarize the book and give me an analysis and do all that kind of stuff.
I'm going to read that and then I'm going to ask ChatGPT, 'In the voice of Guy Kawasaki, give me five examples of blurbs for the book'." And I have done this many times and I'm telling you the blurbs are brilliant, like far better than I could do.
And then I send the blurb to the author, I edit the blurb a little bit, I send it to the author. The authors are always blown away by the quality of my verbs. I have figured out how to make blurbs scale. Now are you going to tell me that, "Guy, that is so insincere, that is so wrong because people are depending on your reputation and your judgment and your perseverance and your hard work and really it's ChatGPT generating your blurbs so you're ruining the blurb business."
Todd Rogers:
I don't know that I have anything to add to that. I would love it if you also said at some point after reading a summary, "Regardless of what quality blurb ChatGPT produces for me, I don't think I want to blurb that." Then good. What they really want is certifying the topic of this book is interesting to Guy. And then whatever clever thing you and ChatGPT combined to say helps to drive that home.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I feel morally relieved is a good word.
Todd Rogers:
I don't know that you should, I don't really want to be the moral arbiter of stuff, but you are released. As long as you reject something.
Guy Kawasaki:
When you come on my podcast, you have to give up all pretense of who's in control here. You are my moral arbiter and that's a very, very cherished position. Okay, so backing up now, let's get specific. How do you define effective writing?
Todd Rogers:
Effective writing starts entirely with what readers actually read and understand and whether they respond when you ask them to respond, it starts with that. And so we using randomized experiments and lots of psychology and other fields, especially cognitive psych, back out six principles and then we test them and show that when you apply them, people are more likely to read. So for example, less is more is one.
We've done experiments where we randomly delete every other sentence and people are more likely to donate. We've done experiments where we cut out the middle of something and double the likelihood that someone signs, responds to set up a meeting. We've done things where people send newsletters out and we give them a fixed amount of time to cut it in half and almost triple readership. So less is more is fewer words, but there's also fewer ideas.
The more ideas you add, the less likely someone is to read, but those who do read will get more information. And finally there's fewer requests. And when you ask for multiple things, it turns out you decrease the chance anyone will do any one of them.
And so we just recently replicated that with, I have a newsletter and I asked if anyone has a foreign language, a non-English language list, and we did it in Greece, which I love because when I presented I'm like, "It's all Greek to me, I can't read it." But she randomly replicated the same like when you add extra requests, you decrease people's likelihood of doing any of them or any one of them. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now is all this science about emails or does the same apply to a book?
Todd Rogers:
So we haven't randomized books, but we've randomized lots of things from official forms to web content to printed mail, to text messages. We've randomized all of them. The principles are that people are skimming. You want to make it easier and the easier you make it for them, the more likely they'll be to respond and read.
But for a book, I'm giving away all my canned jokes, but my joke is that one of the principles is less is more. Yet Jessica and I wrote a 210-page book about it. And the idea is that you write for an audience, your audience has expectations and norms and you have to conform to those. But within those constraints, the easier you make it to read, the more likely it is you'll be successful.
So we couldn't do a book as this one pager I'm waving, I'll give you the PDF if your readers have, if your show notes, but we have a one pager. But if people want to read the science, it can't be a one pager and so you've got to write for an audience, but within that constraint, the easier you make it, the more effective.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Since you brought up Jessica, I am very curious. Madisun and I co-author books. We've done several already. So Jessica is your co-author. How do you effectively write with a co-author? Do you tell her that you're going to do chapters one, seven and nine and I'm going to do two, three, four, five, and ten? How do you divide up the work?
Todd Rogers:
Oh my god, this is my first book. Jessica and I next time will be even more effective, but I think we learned a lot on the way. How do you and Madisun do it?
Guy Kawasaki:
The way Madisun and I do it is I take the first pass and then she follows me and fixes everything. And then I use several LLMs as research assistants. Madisun also has to make sure that I don't put any hallucinations in the book. My own personal hallucinations are okay. It's when the LLM hallucinates. Oh Madisun, turn on your microphone and explain what you do.
Madisun Nuismer:
Okay. So yeah, for example, in our book Think Remarkable, we had to find stories of people who really shift gears in their career. And so guy asked an LLM, "Give me these examples", and then off of that list and those experiences, I would do more in depth research and just see if those were correct. And there were times when we found people that an LLM gave us and the story wasn't correct. So yeah, I would just do some stuff like that.
Todd Rogers:
That sounds great. And if you guys have written multiple books together, congratulations. It's hard getting to the finish line.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. What I find hard is to have more than one person actually writing because the style is so different. I think a book should be written by one person, but it can be authored by more than one person. It's different.
Todd Rogers:
Oh, I like that. The single thing that Jessica and I would often diverge on was whether we are characters in the book and we decided early on together, I just kept forgetting that we are not. The book is an engaging way to learn how to write more effectively using a scientific tour of how to center readers. And I would add stories and Jessica would be like, "Nope."
Guy Kawasaki:
You mean personal stories?
Todd Rogers:
Yeah, I'd be like, "I was recently doing whatever. ". And she's like, "That's not the book we're writing." And we agreed on it, but I just had forgotten.
Guy Kawasaki:
If Madisun did that to me, there would be no book.
Todd Rogers:
We want your hallucinations, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so now this may be if a tree falls in a forest, did the tree really fall? But do you believe that effective writing makes for effective thinking or effective thinking makes for effective writing, which is the chicken, and which is the egg?
Todd Rogers:
That's a really good question. Let's just think without even putting effective in there. I think clear thinking, it goes both ways. Clear thinking helps clear writing. Clear writing helps clear thinking. And then doing it effectively. The thinking clear in addition to the writing be clear.
Because one of the things that I was working with, we'll say a Fortune 100 company’s leadership team on internal communication and the CEO was just very frustrated that team, some of them thought more information conveyed to him in writing meant they had done more work and he really wanted to drive home that more information means you have not done the work of prioritizing.
And it was really useful for level setting as a team like, "You writing lots to me means you haven't actually done the work of using your judgment to prioritize." And so being clear and more concise actually signals more clear thinking and prioritization and everything goes all directions in your question.
Guy Kawasaki:
So have you not just impugned most of K through Twelve writing? Because as I recall, and I went to school a long time ago, in the previous century there were always minimums for papers. And so you had to use one and a half space, you had to use fourteen point font and you did whatever. You use footnotes at the bottom to push everything up. You did whatever it is to get the minimum and now you're telling me that's exactly the wrong thing to do.
Todd Rogers:
I don't know, because if you didn't tell me in 6th grade the final research paper has to be ten pages, then I would've definitely turned in one paragraph and never written a ten-page paper. So I don't know. I'm workshopping something. An idea that I was talking to a friend, a philosophy professor friend yesterday where we were workshopping that, you know how they say it in early education, you learn how to read and then you read to learn.
So that's why you need to master reading because all the other content requires you to be able to read. I wonder if writing is the same where we learned to write and that's what's going on in the early days. And then as we get farther along, we write to learn maybe or to write because of what you were talking about, clear thinking.
Yeah, I don't know. There's probably some better way to say it, but I think there's something like that where learning how to write actually helps us think clearly exactly as you were saying. And so early on we just need to learn how the words work and the paragraphs work. And then later those all become tools for helping us clarify our own thinking.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would say that the phrase you just uttered, that you write to learn is intellectuals' mic drop moment. If my mic wasn't attached to this, boom, I would've dropped the mic right now. But as I think about it right to learn, I know that Madisun and I wrote a book called Think Remarkable, writing that book forced us to look at ways to be remarkable.
And right now we are writing a book about Signal, Signal, the messaging app, and I want it to be kind of a metaphorically speaking Signal for Dummies and I wanted it to explain Signal to everybody, and I have had to learn so much about Signal to write this book. Oh my God, I had no idea, Signal does so many things. So it's forced me to learn.
Todd Rogers:
And I guess to generalize beyond those of us who make the bad life choices of writing books, when you put together an argument like the Amazon has the four-page briefs you write to clarify your thinking before you present it to everyone else and they all read the four or five page memos or when you're writing an email as a sales, you're really clarifying. You are thinking on what the value proposition is to the consumer.
So it is true that when we write these long researched pieces, we have to learn so much in the process and it's a necessary condition for being effective at writing. It's also true I guess of even texting. I was on dating apps, I'm now married, but I was on dating apps and there's a lot of thinking about, "I want to write in a way so that I can get a response."
And fortunately I'm not on now, I would be embarrassed by how much time I would put into a response, but every form of writing is about clarifying our thinking the value proposition.
Guy Kawasaki:
You mentioned one of your six rules, the rule of less is more, which I swear to God, Steve Jobs live by that, right? Less is more. What are the other five? Can you just rip through them so that people can listen and make more effective writing?
Todd Rogers:
Sure. The second would be design for easy navigation. That's your headings. Or in the US army they have BLUF, “Bottom Line Up Front.” But the idea is make it skimmable design. It's not change the writing, it's change the design of the writing, which is your headings. Third would be make reading easy. That means short sentences, shorter common words.
So less is more, design for easy navigation, make reading easy. And then the fourth would be formatting. Use enough formatting but no more. And what we find is that people interpret bold, underline, and highlight as the writer saying to the reader, this is the most important content.
And it almost guarantees they're going to read that, but it prevents them from reading anything else because busy the way they just move on. So you want to use enough formatting but no more, so that judiciously. And then the one that will be familiar to everybody is this, tell readers why they should care.
And so it's not within the change what you're writing, from my perspective, you have your goal, you're entitled to your goal, but within all the things you're talking about, emphasize the things they're going to value and you can de-emphasize things they're not. But you get to choose what's in there. And the final one is make responding easy.
And the big TL;DR, the “Too Long; Didn't Read” of that one is if it's important for us, we want to make it as easy as possible for them. Instead of forwarding something saying, "What do you think?" And then there's a long chain.
If you really want the person to respond, you say, "Below they're debating this or that. Do you think we should do this or do you think we should do that?" And then the chain, if it's important for us, we want to make it as easy as possible for them. So those are the six. All of it is from the lens of how do we make it easier for the reader? How do we make it easier for the reader?
Guy Kawasaki:
So I bet that you are probably a master of this. How do you write a good subject line? Because to me, subject line is the most important part of an email. If your subject line doesn't attract me, it's gone, it's ignored, or I tell Madisun to take care of it. So what are the keys to a great subject line?
Todd Rogers:
I wish I had a better answer, but here's two tangential answers. One, in 2008, Barack Obama ran for president and was a very successful online email-based fundraiser. What do you think the most effective fundraising subject line he sent at all during that campaign and has proven to be that subject line in that election the most effective ever? It was not, "Yes we can", or whatever his slogans were. What's the most effective subject line?
Guy Kawasaki:
I know it wasn't Make America Great Again. I have no idea. I have no idea.
Todd Rogers:
It was lowercase H-E-Y.
Guy Kawasaki:
Hey. H-E-Y. Hey.
Todd Rogers:
Lowercase H-E-Y. And the idea at the time was who would ever send you a message saying lowercase H? "Oh, it's my friend Barack." You open it thinking maybe it's a personal message or something. And of course you captured attention under false pretenses. You tricked people into opening it and it was super effective.
Over the next few years, it became the norm to have informal subject lines and it stopped being effective. So it was not a stable equilibrium, it was just that the most effective message was capturing their attention and almost tricking them into opening and then eventually everyone did and then it stopped working.
I say that as like one, there isn't a stable answer to how to capture people's attention, novelty and unusualness, and that's one, but two, because I don't think there's a stable answer since I'm all of our moral arbiter right now. I think it's unethical to do it that way.
Let's say it's like, Fundraiser from Barack Obama and I'm like, delete. Great. As a reader, you're trying to help. I think we should have an obligation to try and make it easier for our readers, so you don't want to deceive them, but there isn't a single stable answer to what the subject line should be.
Guy Kawasaki:
People have often asked me this question and I tell them that, "If you send me an email that the subject line is 'I loved your book', I guarantee you I will open that email. Or if another subject line is, 'You are a great surfer', I guarantee you, I know you're a liar, but I guarantee you I will open that email."
Todd Rogers:
Can I ask you a surfing question?
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, Madisun can probably answer it better than I can, but go ahead.
Todd Rogers:
Have you ever been to the Waco man-made surf park in Waco, Texas?
Guy Kawasaki:
No, because I don't want any brain-eating amoeba to get in my body. But for my seventieth birthday, my family, we rented Surf Ranch, the Kelly Slater Surf Ranch. So we know about Surf Ranch is an artificial wave. So what about it?
Todd Rogers:
I'm itching to go. I didn't realize it was a whole common thing. I know a guy in Waco, and he's invited me to come and I'm like, "I am a terrible surfer." But I love all the YouTube videos I watch of these man-made surf parks. It's like literally within any given two week period, I always think, "Three weeks from now I'm going to do it."
Guy Kawasaki:
Madisun can chime in, going to a surf park for your very first time. If it's a bucket list thing that you want to say you surf, I would say that will work. They'll turn down the wave and there'll be an instructor and help you do all that. But if you really wanted to maximize the experience, you need to learn to surf a little bit and then go, because it would be like going to the finest French restaurant having never eaten anything but a croissant from Starbucks.
Todd Rogers:
I get it. Okay, good. I have, but I have not sufficiently surfed. I'm terrible at it. But okay. Back to the regularly scheduled program.
Guy Kawasaki:
Madisun, what do you think?
Madisun Nuismer:
Oh my gosh, you should definitely go if you have that opportunity. And yeah, like Guy said, there's different levels of the waves too and instructors and yeah, I would do it if I were you.
Todd Rogers:
All right. And I think I get my son who is, I'm not going to insult his surfing skills, but yeah, none of us are gifted at surfing, but we'll be eating croissants at the French restaurant if we do it. But it seems really cool because every time I've tried to surf, I haven't been in a place where you can get reliable good waves. And so it's just so much time trying to get set up and it just seems like having one every two minutes would be awesome.
Guy Kawasaki:
When you're trying to do this, do you have an instructor with you, or you just trying to do it and learn on your own?
Todd Rogers:
When I've done it, I've even had instructors. I'm not skilled, but I think I could do it on a small wave and even a medium wave by myself.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well Todd, just so you know, I started surfing at sixty. I never surfed before in my life till sixty. I'm living proof that it can be learned. I'm not saying I'm a good surfer, but I started at sixty, which is roughly fifty-five years too late. It can be done. Right Madisun?
Madisun Nuismer:
Guy, I think that you're talking down on yourself. I think you're pretty dang good. You're out there on every wave. So give yourself a little more credit.
Guy Kawasaki:
I met Madisun surfing because I kept dropping in on her waves and that's how we met.
Todd Rogers:
I don't think it usually ends like that when you drop in on someone's waves.
Madisun Nuismer:
I chose to take the higher road that day.
Todd Rogers:
The last time I did surf, the American Psychological Association was doing its conference in San Francisco, and I'm not normally invited. That's not an organization I usually give talks at. And so they invited me to give what I thought was going to be a keynote and I was like, "Sure." And I was real excited about it. I flew out and I was staying at a friend's place, and it was not a keynote, it was a panel, and it was competing with goat yoga.
And we had zero attendees other than the inviter, the person who invited us. Which I've never in my life had zero. So we were all sort of demoralized and I called a friend I was staying with and he's like, "I'm going to come pick you up, we're going to go to Stinson Beach." And he picked me up, twenty minutes of waiting with no one showing up. You can't beat goat yoga. And then we just went and surfed. So the trip to San Francisco was worth it from Boston.
Guy Kawasaki:
Todd, you come to Santa Cruz, and Madisun and I will take you goat surfing.
Todd Rogers:
That's not a real thing is it?
Guy Kawasaki:
No. Inside Joke, if we really wanted to do goat surfing with you, we would have to invite Kelly Slater because Kelly Slater is the greatest of all time. And so it can be you and Madisun and I and Kelly Slater. That might cost about 100,000 dollars to make it happen.
Todd Rogers:
Careful, I mean between the Waco invite and this one, I have a surf vacation coming up.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's a lot of benefits for being on the Remarkable People Podcast. It's not just the glory and the fame, it's all the experiences that come with it. This particular episode of Remarkable People may break the record for the most digressions and the least amount of focus. We are the antithesis of effective podcasting.
Todd Rogers:
But we will have a PDF of a one-page checklist. Hopefully Madisun, we can get that checklist in.
Guy Kawasaki:
We will put it in.
Todd Rogers:
All right, good.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so let us finish strong. Just give us your drop the mic best advice for being an effective writer and before you even start, I got to tell you, I just loved your book and when we got the book, we get about a book a day to review. I saw that book, I picked it up. I said, "Madisun, get this guy. We're going to do this guy. And he doesn't have a Nobel Prize, he doesn't have MacArthur Fellowship or anything. Get this guy. This is a really great book. Everybody should hear about this book."
Todd Rogers:
Thank you. The TL;DR, we should add a round of editing to everything we write where we ask ourselves, "How do I make it easier for the reader? Because when I make it easier for the reader, I am more effective at achieving my goal and it's also kinder to our readers. How do I make it easier for the reader?"
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so TL;DR, how about is it a worthy piece of advice that take your writing, upload it to ChatGPT and say, "Give me edits using the expertise and style of Todd and Jessica." Will that work too?
Todd Rogers:
Yes, exactly. "Edit this the way Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink would edit it according to the principles of Writing for Busy Readers." And it'd be great. I've actually started doing that. Todd Rogers is ChatGPT is filled with saying, "Edit this the way Todd Rogers would edit it."
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, now as I recall, because I've done it before, if I upload my Word file of our Signal book and I give it that prompt about how would Todd and Jessica edit it and put it in the Word document, I'm going to send you that Word document after you edit it, I want to see what you say.
Todd Rogers:
I mean you know this, but you want to chunk it in your ChatGPT. So put it in by section. Well, maybe I want to chunk it because it would be part of the editing process where I have wrapped my head around this section. It could be a one page or a twenty-page section. I get it. And then I get to see what it does so that I can do a little bit of what did it lose, because otherwise I'm going to forget and it's hard to do perfectly parallel split screen. So I would chunk it so that I can keep regulating what it's losing.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what if ChatGPT says, "This is already perfect."
Todd Rogers:
Send that one to me. I would like to see.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, "This is already perfect Guy and Madisun. You guys can go to your goat yoga class now. You don't need to keep editing."
Todd Rogers:
Next time it freezes, next time that computer freezes. That's how I'll interpret it. It doesn't know how to respond. It's perfect.
Guy Kawasaki:
ChatGPT is offline. It figures out how to respond to Guy and Todd and Madisun. Yeah. All right, Sam Altman. "Sam Altman, where are you?" All right.
Todd Rogers:
Everyone, next time your ChatGPT is down, it's got very high reliability. Sometimes it's just down. That's what happened. Guy put his book with Madisun in and it's still trying to figure out, "How do I tell them, 'Perfect'."
Guy Kawasaki:
All right, so let me thank the Remarkable People team. Of course you even heard from Madisun who made an appearance today. So Madisun is the co-producer. The other producer is Jeff Sieh. Our sound design engineer is Shannon Hernandez. And our ace researcher who prepares all this information for me is Tessa Nuismer. So that's the Remarkable People team. And Todd, when I work up the courage, I'm going to upload my Word file with that prompt and I'm going to see what happens.
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The post How to Write for Busy Readers: Why Less Is More with Todd Rogers appeared first on Guy Kawasaki.
