The 6 Principles for Writing Messages People Won't Swipe Away

Think of all the texts, emails, and social media posts you're inundated with each day. Sometimes you read them, and sometimes you swipe them away, telling yourself, perhaps not so honestly, that you'll revisit them later.

If you're the sender of such missives and memos or the creator of content, you hope the recipient has the first response, that, instead of deep-sixing your message, they take the time to engage and take action on it.

How do you increase the odds of that happening? Rather than just guessing at the answer, Todd Rogers has done empirical experiments to discover it. Todd is a behavioral scientist, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. Today on the show, Todd explains the four-stage process people use in deciding whether to engage with your writing, whether in a personal or business context, and how influencing these factors not only comes down to the style of your writing, but its overall design. Todd offers tips to improve both areas, so that you can effectively capture people's attention.

• AoM Podcast #971: The 5 Factors for Crafting Simple (Read: Effective!) Messages
• AoM Podcast #666: The Power of Brevity in a Noisy World
• AoM Podcast #580: Why People Do (Or Don’t) Listen to You

• Todd on X
• Todd's faculty page
• Writing for Busy Readers website

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