How to Write for Busy Readers: Why Less Is More with Todd Rogers

0:00From October 7th to 9th in San Francisco, the Masters of Scale Summit returns. It's where the boldest minds in business, tech, and beyond gather to build the future. And we want you to join us. Hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. They're all on the same stage, and it's not just another conference. It is the gathering for remarkable people. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. That's mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. We write in these complicated ways in part because that's how we were taught to write.

0:44We 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.

1:09Hello, 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.

1:55But 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 52 times a year for a guest. 50 out of the 52 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.

2:39So 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-12 attendance. He has co-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, subtitle, Communicate More Effectively in the Real World.

3:32How's that for an introduction, Todd? That's the best. That beginning part about everyone should read it, et cetera. I was like, I wonder if it's too late to add that to the blurb on the paperback. Oh, you know what? There are so many things I'm going to ask you about this book because I've written 17 books. Some people say I wrote one book 17 times, so 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.

4:16And I noticed that you thank Bob Cialdini in your acknowledgement. So what did he do for this book? Because he is my hero. 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 in organizational behavior and all the while admiring this guy and his work.

5:03And 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 coauthor 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.

5:44And I leaned into vulnerability and showing emotion. And I started crying while giving my talk, talking about it. And I normally I would choke it down, but I was like, you know what? No, doing a service to everybody else. And I got all choked up talking about how important he's been in my life. And yeah, Bob's an inspiration, mentor and friend. Same with me. I think the two biggest academic influences, probably there's three. There's Phil Zimbardo, Carol Dweck, and Bob Cialdini. Anyway, all right. I've co-authored with Carol too. I think Zimbardo was before my time, but yeah, that's a great list.

6:23Are you saying I'm old? I think people now would say Zimbardo would make their list because he was so influential and such an inspiring scholar. Okay. So now I want to tap your expertise about one thing. How do we increase voter participation and engagement? 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 started, 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.

7:06And 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 and 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 like realistic expectations.

7:44That's the short answer. 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? 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?

8:33And it had never cross in mind. And I was pretty proud of the people I work with, you know, 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 like, 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.

9:13So are you saying that I'm the first person in your career to ask how to suppress faults? If you're asking that in earnest, then yes. If you're asking, has anyone ever asked me, then no. Like 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 me how to turn out, how to suppress turn out? I'll be like, yeah, there was this guy. I'm trying to wrap my head around whether that is praise or condemnation.

9:50Okay. Okay. So now something that I don't think anybody can argue against is you did work about how to reduce K through 12 absenteeism. So how do you do that? And I'm not suggesting I want to know how to suppress attendance. 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.

10:37and 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.

11:13The second is they have a bunch of false beliefs about their own kids' attendance. For example, they underestimate their own kids' attendance by a factor of two. So my kid has missed 20 days, I think 10. And then the final is that they don't realize their kid has missed more than their classmates, which is also just that kind of is a universal thing. We assume the Lake Wobegon effect, like our kid is better than average. And so the majority of 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 10 bucks per day generated.

11:56The point is just that it's about 50 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 day labs that now works in most of large districts around the country to implement this, to reduce absenteeism using the sort of like 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. Okay. I'm sure you will know what study I'm referring to and who did it.

12:34I'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 like a lot of controversy you shouldn't be paying people to send their kids to school is it motivated is that roland fryer i cannot remember John List? 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. Yeah. The intervention that we developed is telling parents their kid misses more school than their classmates.

13:20And 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, 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 20 days I miss.

13:54And 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. When the kids miss too much school, but they'll miss 15 or 20 days, but they'll attend 160 days. And so how do you like cost effectively target the marginal day, right? The incremental day, as opposed to compensating for all the days they already would have attended.

14:22So 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 15 minutes so i told you i read about 52 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 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 10 sentences and you cannot have a subheading and you cannot use bullets like why do people do that another question i've never no one has ever asked oh we are only just beginning to know 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 like they're writing without an eye towards how people are actually going to read it.

15:45That's the, that's the objection, right? It's like, you're not, 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. So basically your assumption is that most people are skimmers, right? So talk about skimming. 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.

16:24They'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. 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? Yeah, it's great. The eye tracking research, where they like lock your face in and then they make you read, like 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 like your non-fiction books that you said you read 50 a year i'm sure many of them you're like i already know this section i'm gonna see wait keep go fast that's scanning and then once you're like triggered you're like that's interesting then you jump in and you skim and you're like dart around but you now you're not going up down you're going left right and you're going backwards and you're skipping and then occasionally you're like i think i missed the point.

17:27It 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 like when we write complicated sentences, long, convoluted, but chromatically 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're starting the reader's experience, you want them to go through it quickly and fully get the idea.

18:00And your convoluted sentence doesn't help. 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? 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.

18:37You 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. 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.

19:18So 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 nother 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 like 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?

20:04Yes. And I think it 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 a few hundred thousand users, like three or four hundred thousand 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 like, if you say, write the way Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink would edit this the way Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink would edit it for busy readers.

20:51It 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 the 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. And where do I access this? Cause I'm writing another book. I'm going to stick my book in this. The moment we hang up. You can just ask Chad GPT with that prompt. Oh, because it's all in there.

21:22Like how would Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky think, according to the book, right? For busy readers. That's proof that it's sort of consumed the book, but good, even better, even better. Cause it makes it easier for people. Wow. 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, right? I look for every instance of the word B because I wanted to make everything the active voice.

22:05I look for every instance of the word, which to see if it should have been that I call this the witch 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. Yeah, please. 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.

22:53I'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.

23:35And really, it's ChatGPT generating your blurbs, so you're ruining the blurb business. I don't know that I have anything to add to that. I would love it if you also said at some points after reading a summary, regardless of what quality blurb ChatGPT produces for me, I don't think I want to blurb that. Then good. And like what they really want is certifying the topic of this book is interesting to guy. And then whatever clever thing you and ChatGPT combine to say helps to drive that home. Okay. I feel morally relieved is the good word. I don't know that you should, I don't really want to be the moral arbiter of stuff, but you are released of moral, as long as you reject some.

24:20When 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? 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.

25:03So 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 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 is 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 present it 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.

26:04Now, is all this science about emails or does the same apply to a book? So we haven't randomized books, but we've randomized lots of things from like official forms to web content, to printed mail, to text messages. We've randomized all of them. Like 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.

26:44Your 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 page where I'm waiving. 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. Since you brought up Jessica, I am very curious, Madison and I co-author books. We've done several already.

27:16So Jessica is your co-author. How do you effectively write with a co-author? Do you tell her that, you know, you're going to do chapters one, seven, and nine, and I'm going to do two, three, four, five, and 10. How do you divide up the work? Oh my God. Well, 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 Madison do it? The way Madison 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, Madison also has to make sure that I don't put any hallucinations in the book.

27:57My own personal hallucinations are okay. It's when the LLM hallucinates. So Madison, you turn on your microphone and explain what you do. Okay. So yeah, for example, in our book, Think Remarkable, we had to find stories of people who really like shift gears in their career. And so Guy asked in LLM, give me these examples. And then off of that list and those experiences, I would do like 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. That sounds great.