[Book 37] Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink

Writing for Busy Readers is a guide to crafting effective written communication for daily needs, such as emails, presentations and short memos. Above all, this book teaches you to be empathetic towards your recipients by writing in a way that makes it easy for them to understand and act on your message.

We all face a deluge of information daily, so we often skim messages to grasp the main points before deciding whether to engage further. Todd and Jessica explain that knowing readers will skim regardless gives us a mindset to engage with them most effectively. One tactic is to make key information immediately visible and stand out from the rest.

Great writing involves revision and editing, often multiple times. When writing for busy readers, editing is primary an act of subtraction, rather than addition. The less you write or ask for, the more likely you are to get a response, provided there’s just enough detail for the reader to act on. The extra time spent revising may seem wasteful, but it pays off by avoiding unanswered messages or dealing with unnecessary follow-ups.

This book has helped me distill my thinking into the most salient points and provided several editorial tips. It should be required reading for new hires but is also a valuable resource for established professionals.

As a bonus, and not covered by this book, a generative AI tool like ChatGPT serves as a helpful proofreading partner (and is used for these blog posts).

You should read this book if you…

• want to be a better writer
• seek higher adoption of your ideas and recommendations
• want techniques to improve the clarity of your thinking

Additional Information

Year Published: 2023
Book Ranking (from 1-10): 10 – Superb – Changed the way I live my life
Ease of Read (from 1-5): 2 – Quick read

Key Highlights

1. Being clear with your words also forces you to be clear in your own thinking. It brings your ideas and goals into sharper focus
2. You also will not find simplistic, inflexible lists of writing rules, as you will find in some of the more modern how-to books on efficient (rather than effective) writing. Rather, our principles derive from the sciences of psychology and human behavior, blended with a social understanding that most people have limited time and attention
3. Shortcut #1: We most quickly notice elements that have a strong visual contrast with their surroundings
4. Shortcut #2: Our selective attention can be intentionally and purposefully directed
5. The bottom line is that your mind works most effectively when it has a clear anchor point: one thing it is noticing, one thing it is focusing on, one task that it needs to initiate in response. Writing that respects those limitations is more likely to get through to a busy brain—and to the reader who possesses it
6. When people are asked to complete a mixed set of easy and hard tasks, they typically tackle the easy tasks first. The pattern holds true even if people are offered financial incentives for prioritizing the hard ones
7. If your reader is going to spend just five seconds on your message, what is the most important information you want them to come away with?
8. Not sure how to be an effective rewriter? On each revision, continually ask yourself these two essential questions: “What is the most important information I want my readers to understand?” and “How do I make it easier for my readers to understand it?”
9. Writing concisely requires a ruthless willingness to cut unnecessary words, sentences, paragraphs, and ideas. It can be hard to delete the words that you spent time crafting—to “murder your darlings”
10. THE RULES OF WELL-DESIGNED WRITING Rule 1: Make Key Information Immediately Visible. Rule 2: Separate Distinct Ideas. Rule 3: Place Related Ideas Together. Rule 4: Order Ideas by Priority. Rule 5: Include Headings
11. In general, readers look to the sentence preceding a bulleted list to determine whether the list itself is worth reading
12. One of the most potent ways to increase the likelihood that people will act is to make the action happen without any effort on their part. That is, you can set up a default action that will take place automatically if they do nothing at all
13. Ultimately, writers must balance their desire to communicate everything relevant with the understanding that the more they add, the less readers will read
14. Using introductory text to tell readers what the rest of the text is about is called “signposting.” Signposting is not the core content being written about, but rather a road map for the rest of the writing. Although it typically adds words, it can be helpful for making longer messages or messages with multiple pieces of information easier to navigate