A new book suggests two ways in which writers can make their work ‘relevant’ for busy readers

Emphasise what readers value (“So what?”)

When readers regard a topic as personally relevant, they will exert more effort to understand it, read more deeply, and recall more content. Researchers have experimentally confirmed what we’ve all noticed subjectively: People tend to devote more time and effort to things that affect them directly. In one study, psychologist Richard Petty and his colleagues asked undergraduate students to read about a college policy under consideration, such as creating an exam requirement for graduation. When students were told that the college they currently attended was considering the policy, they read the policy more carefully and fully than when they were told a college in another state was considering it. A separate study conducted at the University of Notre Dame looked at the youth voter engagement organisation Rock the Vote to explore how a sense of personal consequences can improve the success rate of a real message. Rock the Vote, an organisation created to recruit young voters at rock shows, emailed 19,990 people encouraging them to volunteer to register voters at live concerts. The emails went out in two versions. The Writer’s Perspective version included a subject line that reflected the writer’s goal of recruiting new volunteers. The Reader’s Perspective version included a subject line that focused instead on something that the recipient might value:

Writer’s Perspective:
Subject: Volunteer with Rock the Vote

Reader’s Perspective:
Subject: Want to attend free events?

The Reader’s Perspective version also included a sentence in the body of the message reiterating, “You’ll get to see the best shows for free and do important work at the same time!” Email list subscribers who received the Reader’s Perspective version were nearly four times as likely to sign up to volunteer as those who received the Writer’s Perspective version.

In this example, appealing to readers’ self-interest – a free concert sounds good! – helped Rock the Vote accomplish its goal of increasing volunteers. In this case, the organization was targeting young people, who are likely to be music lovers, but free concerts aren’t the only thing readers care about. They may also be motivated to help others, to express their values, to conform to the behaviour of others, or to just be seen as a good person. In the same experiment, Rock the Vote tested additional messages that emphasised these other topics. None yielded as many volunteer sign-ups as the “free concert” message, but other types of readers in other contexts will inevitably respond differently. It is important to understand the perspective of your specific readers, and to test different messages, when possible.

The Rock the Vote study also highlights an important ethical consideration in appeals to the reader’s personal desires and goals. Some recipients of the Reader’s Perspective version may have opened the email because they were tempted by the prospect of free concert tickets, but had no interest in volunteering. These readers would have wasted their time reading a message that they were ultimately not interested in, and in doing so may have felt misled. At the same time, other recipients may have engaged with the message because of the appeal of free concert tickets but then discovered that – despite not anticipating it – they were interested in volunteering. These same readers might have ignored the Writer’s Perspective message. Those readers would end up better off for having received the Reader’s Perspective version since it allowed them to discover an opportunity they valued that they would have otherwise missed.

Ultimately, the people who crafted the Rock the Vote emails, like all writers, had to balance the costs and benefits of emphasising different information. Perhaps the cost of time for concert-loving readers who have no interest in ever volunteering is an acceptable price to pay for recruiting more volunteers. In other contexts, the risk of misleading readers or wasting their time may outweigh the benefits of using the approach reflected in the Reader’s Perspective. If the reader-oriented message seems fundamentally deceptive, or if the reader is not sympathetic to the writer’s goals, the communication can end up alienating its target audience in addition to wasting their time.

A good shorthand for writers who are working on practical communications is: “So what?” Try to picture the recipient of your message and consider what would make that person care about what you are saying. An additional factor to consider is not only why the reader should care but why the reader should care now – that is, the timeliness of the message. Even the simplest daily messages (text messages, work emails, Slack threads) are more effective if you write them with the recipient’s perspective in mind.

Emphasise which readers should care (“Why me?”)

Accurately predicting what ideas readers will care about is difficult, so another useful strategy is to target your message by emphasizing which readers should care. If a message seems generic and impersonal, readers may broadly presume that it is not relevant and ignore it. In that case, the specific readers for whom the message is relevant might miss out on valuable information.

Being explicit about your intended audience is especially pertinent in mass communications that are difficult to target to specific populations. If the city government needs to notify residents that a local library will be closed for construction, this is relevant only for people who use that particular library – but city officials don’t necessarily know who those people are. In such cases, emphasising which readers a message is relevant for can help save readers time and increase the chance that the information reaches those who need it.

Think about what happens when a grocery item, say Soup XYZ, needs to be recalled due to safety concerns. Grocery stores that sold the recalled soup don’t have a list of all the individuals who purchased it, but they do have websites and mailing lists and physical store locations where they can post notices. Then they face the question of how to make sure the correct recipients notice and care about the message.

When writing the recall notice, the stores could title it based on what their goal is from their perspective, alerting shoppers that a recall has been issued:

Writer’s Perspective:
Notice: Important product safety recall information

The Writer’s Perspective could be relevant to everyone, but it is so generic that we predict it would get through to almost no one. A Reader’s Perspective title would instead emphasize which readers the message is relevant for:

Reader’s Perspective:
Notice: If you bought Soup XYZ in June, it has been recalled

By tailoring the title toward those readers who should care about the message, the Reader’s Perspective title likely increases the number of relevant readers who engage with it. It also helps readers for whom the message is irrelevant to know to skip it, making it both more effective and kinder to busy readers.

In everyday personal and business communications, often there is just one person at the other end. But we all run into the same issues of targeting as soon as the message expands to a group text, an office email list, a widely read Slack channel, and so on. In this case, there’s another simple shorthand test to apply: “Why me?” Imagine the recipient looking at the message and asking, “Why me? Why did I receive this message?”

You probably know the experience of getting a mass email about a company outing you care nothing about or notifications about a distant acquaintance’s vacation adventures. As long as the messages were clear up front about who they were aimed at, you probably ignored them and went about your day. If you wasted your time reading something irrelevant, though, you may have felt irritated, even cheated. To write effectively, bring that perspective to your own writing; be clear about who you expect will care and why they should care. Such targeting will make your messages more personal to the readers you are trying to reach and less disruptive to the ones you aren’t.

Excerpted with permission from Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World, Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink, Scribe Publications.