Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

Think of all the texts, emails, and social media posts you're inundated with each day.

Sometimes you read them and sometimes you swipe them away, telling yourself, perhaps not so honestly, that you'll

revisit them later. If you're the center of such miscives of memos or the creator of content,

you hope the recipient has the first response. That, instead of deep-sixing your message, they take

the time to engage and take action on it. How do you increase the odds of that happening?

Rather than just guessing at the answer, Todd Rogers has done empirical

experiments to discover it. Todd is a behavioral scientist, professor of public policy at the

Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Writing for Busy Readers, Communicate more effectively

in the real world. Today on the show, Todd explains the four-stage process people use in deciding

whether to engage with your writing, whether in a personal or business context, and how influencing these factors not only comes down to the style of your writing,

but its overall design. Todd offers tips to improve both areas, so that you can effectively

capture people's attention. After shows over, check out our show notes at a.combe.com i.

All right. All right.

Todd Rogers, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So you are a professor of public policy,

and you recently co-authored a book about how to write for busy readers.

What's the connection between researching and writing about public policy and writing for harried people living in the TikTok age?

I've ever been asked to actually defend why this is public policy.

I guess it starts with I spent a decade working on how do we communicate to busy voters

trying to mobilize voters to participate in elections.

...