Writing Concisely

Crafting your emails or any type of writing using the fewest words tends to elevate how well the reader responds.

What I read: “When Writing for Busy Readers, Less Is More” by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink. Published September 11, 2023.

When I still worked in corporate life, I had a wonderful manager for many years. He was one of the main reasons I stayed at that job for so long. Each year we’d meet for our mandatory annual performance review. Thankfully, my reviews were typically excellent. But he had one consistent comment for a few years in a row. “Can you shorten your emails? They’re way too long.”

He was correct. They were. Words come easily to me. Perhaps too easily at times because I spew them forth in abundance, perhaps without considering how long it’s going to take someone on the other end to read it.

After a few years receiving that same review comment, I finally shortened my emails. Dramatically. My former tomes of email communications that were often many lengthy paragraphs were now a sentence or two. Somehow I figured out how restrain my verbosity.

The results were instant and significant. Response rates were much faster and communication channels were far more productive. It turns our my manager was correct with his feedback.

Todd Rogers, a professor of public policy at Harvard University and cofounder of the Analyst Institute and Everyday Labs, and Jessica Lasky-Fink, the research director at The People Lab based at the Harvard Kennedy School, would probably have given me the same feedback my manager gave me. They’ve written a book, Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World, and the article to which I’m linking offers some of their guidance for writing effectively for busy readers. And the truth is, most of us today are busy readers because we’re inundated with text to read on all fronts nonstop throughout most of our days.

The average person receives dozens or even hundreds of messages—emails, text messages, and so on—each day, and the average professional spends nearly one-third of their workweek reading and responding to emails. Those numbers don’t even account for all the other communications that professionals receive outside the workplace. For busy readers, handling this torrent of information and messages is like living in an endless game of Whac-A-Mole. Highly relevant updates about health and school can inadvertently get overlooked or whacked with the delete button.

Rogers and Lasky-Fink mention emails a lot in their article. Understandable. Anyone who works an office job probably experiences a deluge of emails daily. Despite all the productivity, chat, and business process flow strategies put into place in work environments, emails still rule as the primary means of communication. Trimming one’s emails alone can result in a noticeable change in workflow effectiveness.

On average, a wordy message will be dealt with less quickly than a concise message. In the worst case, a wordy message will be relegated to the same fate as the hundreds of other messages that languish in inboxes, never to be read.

Even when ineffectively written communications are read, they impose an unkind tax on readers’ time. At an event we recently led on this topic, one participant wrote: “Lengthy emails in today’s work environment [are] disrespectful of the reader.” The longer the message, the larger the tax.

It’s no surprise that the article by Rogers and Lasky-Fink is itself concise. It’s a quick read and I recommend you do so. This is research-based advice that can benefit all of us if we implement it at work and in our private lives.

In the spirit of embracing concise writing, I sometimes wonder if I get too wordy on these posts. I’m sure I do. Conventional blogging wisdom is to never write a post longer than 1,000 words and keeping them to 500 words is even better. I violate that convention all the time.

While I haven’t done a data-driven analysis of the effectiveness of my writing, I do have evidence that the shorter my communications of whatever kind, the better the response.

When I send a wordy text to someone, I notice it takes longer for them to respond, if they do at all. Same with lengthy posts and articles. When I’m privy to reader activity data, which I am on some platforms, I can clearly see that the readership rate for my shorter posts and articles is greater than for longer ones. You’d think I’d learn from that, but I easily fall into my old wordy habits. It’s still a struggle.

I think just about every type of writing can be more effective if shorter. Books. Articles. Blog posts. Social media posts. Everything. So, in that spirit, I’m going to end this post now and again suggest you read the article. And after reading the article, experiment in your own life with shorter emails, texts, and other writing and see if you can sense a better reception from your readers. I bet that’s what will happen.

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