Questão 1428380

Have you ever taken the time to craft a detailed email to a colleague, or perhaps a text message to a friend, only to have them shoot back a one-line response that makes it clear they didn’t read past the first sentence? The Gazette interviewed Todd Rogers, a behavioural scientist, about his book, “Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World”. Gazette: You make a distinction between “effective writing” and “beautiful writing.” What do you mean by effective writing? Rogers: Effective writing is practical writing with the goal of getting the reader to understand and potentially respond. The guiding insight for the book is that our readers are not reading what we write carefully. Gazette: You discuss experiments that support strategies for simplifying writing. Could you summarize a few of those tips? Rogers: First: Less is more: fewer words, fewer ideas, fewer requests. Omit needless words, so that’s not radical, and it’s costless. Eliminating somewhat-useful-but-not-necessary ideas is harder. It’s a balance between getting the point across and adding too much. Finally, the more actions a message asks of readers, the less likely readers are to do any one of them. Second: Add structure. Most people aren’t reading linearly; they’re jumping around. Third: Use enough formatting, but no more. We found that people interpret underline, bold, and highlight as the writer saying to the reader, “this is the most important content.” When writers highlight or bold a section in a document or an email, it dramatically increases the likelihood that people read that portion, but it decreases the likelihood that they read the rest of the message.