Writing for busy readers: how to get people to read what you send

Executive overview

Most writing goes unread — not because it's poorly written, but because readers are busy and skimming is the default. The fix isn't better prose; it's fewer words, fewer ideas, and fewer requests.

Todd Rogers, a Harvard behavioral scientist, distills this into six principles backed by randomised experiments. The core finding: every additional word, idea, or request you add reduces the chance your reader engages with any of it.

The more you add, the less gets read.

Why everybody skims

• People's goal when reading is to move on as quickly as possible.
• 40% of emails are self-reported as skimmed — including short ones.
• Even text messages get deferred: "I can't deal with that right now."
• Writers over-estimate how carefully their message will be read — the same error as the "tapping songs" experiment, where tappers predicted 90% comprehension; actual listeners got less than 2%.
• Formal writing training (K-12, college) teaches beautiful prose, not effective transfer of information.

Principle: use fewer words

• Concise emails consistently outperform longer ones in response rate.
• In one study, a 49-word email got nearly twice the survey responses of a 127-word version (4.8% vs 2.7%).
• Readers and uninvolved judges consistently predict longer emails will perform better — they are consistently wrong.
• A newsletter sent to 50,000 journalists was cut in half in 30 minutes; the shorter version generated twice as many journalists using the content.
• Practical exercise: draft your message, then try cutting it by 50%. The act of halving forces prioritisation.
• Replace "the reason for" with "because"; replace "in order to" with "to" — cheap and easy cuts that speed reading.

Principle: include fewer ideas

• Each additional idea decreases the probability that any idea is read and acted on.
• In a political fundraising email sent to 700,000 donors, randomly deleting every other paragraph (making it incoherent) still raised 16% more money than the original six-paragraph version.
• The incoherence finding matters: even a structurally broken shorter message outperforms a polished longer one.
• A text with eight ideas (restaurant, breadsticks, time, location, guests, walk route…) can be cut to two sentences: "Dinner is on. Meet at my place at 6:15."
• Prioritise ruthlessly: if you have three things to say and one is critical, cut the other two and send them later if needed.

Principle: make fewer requests

• Multiple requests trigger procrastination ("I'll deal with this later") or partial completion.
• Randomised experiments show additional requests reduce the likelihood any single request is fulfilled.
• First drafts clarify the writer's thinking — that's useful, but the reader doesn't need to see that process.
• Identify the single most important request, delete the rest, and side-pocket them for follow-up.

When you can't write less

• Some communications can't be shortened: multi-stakeholder memos, intelligence assessments with format norms, dean's messages covering multiple constituencies.
• Strategy 1: open with an executive summary — "I'm writing with four updates: A, B, C, D" — so skimmers capture the shape even if they miss the detail.
• Strategy 2: add headings and clear navigation so readers can find what they need without reading everything.
• Amazon's practice: silent reading for the first seven minutes of every meeting guarantees documents are actually read — and forces writers to keep them short enough to finish in that window.

Applying this in practice

• Reserve careful editing for messages that matter: board updates, key client emails, stakeholder communications.
• Count the requests you're making before sending — reduce to the minimum.
• AI tools (the authors tuned GPT-4 on their six principles) can convert a draft email into a skimmable, concise version; tool available at writingforbusyreaders.com.
• Sales and relationship contexts add a competing goal — personality and warmth — but the tradeoff should be conscious, not accidental.
• Writing is not costless: every addition risks the key message not getting through.