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 easy
Including 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.
"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"--
