When Writing for Busy Readers, Less Is More

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.

And yet there is a distressingly widespread misconception among writers that more is better. Perhaps it stems from memories of being a student and pushing to reach the required word count of a ninth-grade essay. It might reflect the hope that writing a lot will make it seem like we are smart and have a lot to say. Conversely, it might reflect a fear that if we don’t write a lot we will leave out some critical piece of information. Whatever the cause of all this verbal excess, the reality is more writing leads readers to be less likely to read anything.

Imagine you open your inbox and you see the following two messages. From the subject lines and senders, you know that they’re work related. You don’t engage with the messages other than to quickly scan their lengths.

Which would you deal with first? Probably the Concise one, right? In a survey we conducted, that’s what 165 out of 166 professionals said, too.

Readers often interpret the length of a message as an indication of how difficult and time-consuming it will be to respond to, which is another reason why they might choose not to engage with a wordy communication.

In one study, we sent two versions of an email to 7,002 school board members across the United States requesting that they complete a short online survey. One email was 127 words; the other was 49 words.

The Concise email yielded nearly twice as many survey responses as the Wordy email—a 4.8 percent response rate instead of 2.7 percent. Some readers likely looked at the length of the Wordy email and chose not to engage with it at all. Others likely didn’t read all the way through it and missed the request at the end. In addition, some readers may have used the length of the email as a signal of how long it would take to complete the survey and decided to pass on the request (which they presumed would be taxing).

Both emails directed recipients to the exact same survey, which took approximately five minutes to complete. Yet, in a separate study, 29 percent of respondents who saw the Concise email believed the survey would take less than five minutes, compared to just 15 percent of respondents who saw the Wordy email. Most readers, but especially those who are pressed for time, are likely to be put off by messages and requests that they expect will be difficult to deal with.

Readers who drop out in the middle of a long message engage in what we call “early quitting.” They may skim the text and decide it is too much to deal with at that moment—too many topics, requested actions, or words—and move on before finishing, hoping to return to it later. Some of these early quitters will never actually return. Others may come back to the message later, but by then they may have missed a critical moment: a payment deadline may have passed, an insurance enrollment window may have closed, or all the available meeting times may have been filled.

Readers often interpret the length of a message as an indication of how difficult and time-consuming it will be to respond to.

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.

Imagine if you receive 120 emails every day (as many people do), and each is three paragraphs long. Reading them in their entirety would require four hours each day. Or flip the situation around and imagine you are sending a three-paragraph message to all 120 employees at your organization. You deliberate over every word; your high school English teacher would be so proud of you. But then it takes each employee two minutes on average to read what you wrote. Across 120 employees, your lovingly crafted message will impose a four-hour time tax. If you cut its length by just one paragraph, you would save eighty total minutes of employees’ time.

Writing concisely requires a ruthless willingness to cut unnecessary words, sentences, paragraphs, and ideas. It can be hard to delete the words that you spent time crafting—to “murder your darlings,” as advised in the classic lectures compiled in On the Art of Writing. But doing so increases the chances that your audience will read what you write. Nancy Gibbs, former editor in chief of Time magazine, would tell her staff that every word has to earn its place in a sentence, every sentence has to earn its place in a paragraph, and every idea has to earn its place in a text.

Spending a little more time up front to be concise saves readers and writers time by reducing follow-ups, misunderstandings, and requests left unfulfilled.

Most of us have never been trained in the skill of concise writing. Compounding the problem, most of us have not been trained in the skill of concise editing (or self-editing), either.

Researchers have found that people tend to add words and content while editing, rather than remove them. In one illustrative study by Gabrielle Adams and colleagues at the University of Virginia, test subjects were asked to read and summarize a short article about the discovery of King Richard III’s bones beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England.

After completing their summary, they were then asked to edit it and improve how well it captured the ideas in the article. In response, 83 percent of participants added words. The same pattern showed up across topics ranging from travel itineraries to patents: we tend to add ideas rather than subtract or remove them in the editing process.

Writing less is one of the six principles of effective writing that we discuss in our book Writing for Busy Readers. The additional effort required to write effectively is an investment. Busy readers are more likely to make time to engage with short, well-structured, skimmable messages. And if they do engage, they are then more likely to take away the most critical information.

Spending a little more time up front to be concise saves readers and writers time by reducing follow-ups, misunderstandings, and requests left unfulfilled.

Reprinted from Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink with permission by Dutton, © 2023 by Todd Rogers, Ph.D,  and Jessica Lasky-Fink, Ph.D.

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