In favour of simple writing

livemint.com:

careful kind of writer, even in informal, throwaway messages. Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink are behavioural scientists, both at Harvard. Their “Writing For Busy Readers" is cleverly titled: all readers are busy nowadays.

People are bombarded constantly with messages, from the mailbox to the inbox to the text-message alert. (They can also be distracted by TikTok or “Candy Crush" at any moment.) What to read, what to skim and what to ignore are decisions that nearly everyone has to make dozens, or even hundreds, of times a day. The authors present well-established principles that have long been prized in guides to writing including The Economist’s style book (which Johnson helped update): cut unnecessary words, choose those that remain from the bedrock vocabulary everyone knows and keep syntax simple.

But “Writing for Busy People" brings evidence. Take “less is more". Most books on writing well preach the advice to omit needless words.

The authors, however, have tested the notion. For example, in an email to thousands of school-board members asking them to take a survey, cutting the length from 127 to 49 words almost doubled the response rate (from a paltry 2.7% to 4.8%). The researchers found that a longer message makes recipients think the task (such as filling out a survey) will take longer, too.

The same applies to text messages. In another experiment, a pandemic-era message to parents first included a few sentences acknowledging the difficulties of home-schooling, then asked them to take a survey. A shorter message inviting them to take the survey got more responses.