Writing for Busy Readers

Informationen zum Autor Todd Rogers is a Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, where he has won teaching awards for the past six consecutive years. He is a behavioral scientist and the co-founder of the Analyst Institute and Everyday Labs. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and Politico , among others. Jessica Lasky-Fink is the Research Director at The People Lab, based at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on improving the delivery of government programs and services. Klappentext "We were all taught the fundamentals of writing well in school. But how do we write effectively in today's hyper-interactive world? When The Elements of Style and On Writing Well were published in 1959 and 1976, the internet hadn't been invented. Since then, there has been a radical transformation in how we communicate. The average American adult receives over 120 emails and over 100 text messages each day. With all this correspondence, gaining a busy reader's attention is now a competition. Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink, both behavioral scientists, offer practical writing advice you can use today. They begin by outlining cognitive facts about how busy people read, then detail six research-backed principles for effective writing: Use fewer words, Lower the reading level, Use formatting judiciously, Make the purpose clear for skimmers, Emphasize value for readers, Make responding as easy as possible Including many examples, a checklist and other tools for the most effective writing, this handbook will make you a more effective communicator. Rogers and Lasky-Fink bring Strunk, White, and Zinsser's core ideas into the 21st century's radically transformed attention marketplace"-- Leseprobe This is a book we never planned to write. There are already plenty of how-to books about the writing process. Nobody we know, ourselves included, would normally think to read a book about writing. There is also something peculiar about the very concept of writing about writing. It seems circular and self-referential: Writing about writing sounds a lot like, say, singing about singing. Then gradually, almost without our noticing, we became convinced that there is a genuine need for a different kind of book about writingone that explains, point by point, the proven techniques for communicating effectively with any recipient, any reader. We also recognized a need to focus specifically on the busy reader, because we live in an unprecedented age of media saturation and information overload. Modern writers need extra help breaking through all the distractions. What you will read about in these pages draws on a vast body of research, much of it by us. It is also informed by many years of our professional and personal experiences. Todd spent a decade working on the science of writing to busy voters. Both of us worked on the science of writing to busy families. During the pandemic, we advised state and local leaders on how to write to busy constituents. Step by step, we realized that some principles of effective writing are nearly universal and yet are not well-known. Viewed this way, the analogy with singing carries a quite different message. Singing is a simple thing that anyone can do but that most of us don't do particularly well. Great singers learn not just by listening to others and making subjective, aesthetic judgments. They train and improve by following well-developed techniques that are grounded in objective studies of anatomy, acoustics, and human perception. So it is with writing. Today, we know what goes on inside a busy reader's brain. We know how a reader's eyes move as they respond to different stimuli. We know why certain types of writing draw a reader's focus while others tend to get lost in the fog of distraction and competition for attention. We wrote this book to share these important, potent...

Auteur

Todd Rogers is a Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, where he has won teaching awards for the past six consecutive years. He is a behavioral scientist and the co-founder of the Analyst Institute and Everyday Labs. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Politico, among others. Jessica Lasky-Fink is the Research Director at The People Lab, based at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on improving the delivery of government programs and services.

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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 more
• Make reading easy
• Design for easy navigation
• Use enough formatting, but no more
• Tell readers why they should care
• Make 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.