A Conversation About Writing and Reading With Rob Ashton
Psst. Here's a super-competitive business secret: write better. What goes into "write better"? A lifetime of research to come, says entrepreneur & expert Rob Ashton. This episode is a surface skim of the deep dive Rob is doing to get people to take the written word more seriously.
Rob founded and ran Emphasis, a company that has trained tens of thousands of people at some of the world's leading organizations to write better. After leaving the CEO seat, the temptation to 'spend a few months' to learn more is looking like his lifetime pursuit.
It touches everything. Why does communication at work so often misfire? Why is good writing seem so effortless to read? As Rob sees it, the key to progress is becoming more familiar with how our brains make decisions based on what we read.
It's a fascinating and complicated topic, and Rob readily admits that he'll probably never be finished understanding it. Fortunately, he's sharing that journey with everyone. He's working on the book, but for now, grab his free Influence course via email: https://influence.robashton.com/
TRANSCRIPT
A Conversation About Writing and Reading with Rob Ashton
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[00:00:00]
Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn host of The Future Of Email with an awfully stupid case of laryngitis and my guest today, Rob Ashton from the UK, correct?
Rob Ashton: Absolutely. Hi. Hi Matthews. Great to be here.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Hey Rob. Rob, and I can't remember how we connected, but Rob, Rob is gonna be one of the most interesting guests we've ever had in the world of email, cuz we're gonna talk about writing.
And the importance of writing and communication, and then I'll stick visual communication stuff in there. And we'll compare notes, give people a bit, excuse me, give people a bit of, of background on yourself and emphasis the company you founded and what you're doing now.
Rob Ashton: Well, I I've been involved in the world of improving, written communication for over 30 years first as an [00:01:00] editor.
Yeah. And then as, as founder of the company, you mentioned emphasis, which is a training consultancy, specializing in written communication founded that 24 years ago since when it's worked with 80,000 people around the globe. All over the globe and which, which is amazing. I still can hardly believe it myself and that's all been in small groups, you know, it's so, but you know, it's been a privilege to work with a huge range of organizations from the tech giants of Silicon valley to even the Royal household at Buckingham palace.
That was the company I founded. But I started off as a scientist, so I, I there's always been something in me that was curious about the science of written communication and how the words we read and the words we write affect what we think and do. And so six years ago Set off on a journey to really delve into that.
And now I'm doing that full time. I, I I write about it and it's and I've, you know, recently [00:02:00] stepped down from, from running that company, which is still very much alive and kicking to focus on, on, on raising awareness of the, of the real science behind this, which there's a surprising surprisingly small amount.
Good quality information, certainly in the business sphere, on the web on, on this topic, there's a lot of pseudoscience, a lot of hearsay and wishful thinking. But the, the, the science that, that, that researchers have been working on doesn't really get much of an airing. So I'm, I'm kind of waging a one man battle to it too, to redress that battle.
Matthew Dunn: Well, I, that, excuse me, that is wonderful. wonderful material to delve into just for context, cuz I think we'll, I think we'll use it in the course of the conversation. Back up to emphasis for a second. Yeah. And tell me a bit about why Silicon valley giant or buggy palace or someone would say, oh yeah, we really should invest in our people being better in their written communi.
Rob Ashton: That's, [00:03:00] that's a really great question. It it's, because I think writing is something that's as a topic is, is misunderstood. And I'm, I'm not talking about the research. I'm talking about our perception of it. When, when you mention writing to most people, they think what creative writing or, or, you know, writing, writing a novel, you, you know, what, what do you mean?
But writing is something we do all. Now, when I, when I, you know, back in 1998, when I set up emphasis, people were talking then about writing, being on the way out, you know, and it's something that we were gonna do less and less of. And how crazy is that? You know, looking back, you just think we had no idea because in fact, we, you know, we're more likely to, to write now almost than we are to speak.
You know, if you try to get in touch with that's true with a help desk Or customer services of a company is gonna be live chat, which is a complete misnomer because it's not chat at all. Is it? It's right. It's writing. Yeah. We email, we've been emailing for a very long time. And now I think the latest [00:04:00] stats I have was 319 billion emails sent and received every day, every day.
Yeah. That's last year. And that's going up by 15 to 20 billion emails per day, per year, every year. Yep. So if my phone rings, I assume something's. But then with those organizations, you know, that they recognize that it's something their people are doing all day, but also it's the, it becomes the primary tool of influence.
So if you are trying to execute on a strategy. You know, you've, you, you've got the strategy, you've got the execution, you've got the results. You've got the feedback in between all of those things. You've got communication and it's usually written communication because that's how you disseminate information throughout an organization.
So in the case of the public sector, you know, of, of governments you, you mentioned the Royal household, people need brief. People, you know, if people are going to make big decisions, they need the information. And they'll usually do that by requesting a report on it and then an update on the report.
And, and that's [00:05:00] of course equally true in, in the private sector and, and, and with those very successful organizations that that emphasis has worked with. But. In between all, all of that, we are communicating more and more just peer to peer. So you've got corporate chat services like slack, right?
Where again, it's, it's all writing. So we, you know, if go back to 2020, when, when the, the world. Started working from home zoom hit the headlines, you know, and zoom sort of moved from being this thing that was kind of a niche product that maybe self-employed consultants and coaches used to something that, that most people had heard of.
And And so it seemed like we were on zoom all the time. And we were meeting, you know, spending hours in meetings. In fact, what the data shows is we spent less time in meetings than we did before we were having more meetings, but shorter ones. But what were we doing in between? We probably weren't on the phone.
We were probably messaging and emailing each other. So, so [00:06:00] we've. A, a species that, that communicates largely using the written word,
Matthew Dunn: right. And companies that are. To just back up to my earlier questions. So com companies that really, that recognize the centrality of that will say helping people get better at this will only help us as a company.
Rob Ashton: Fair EAC. Exactly. And it's, it's a, the, the other reason it's an interesting question is that when you look at those organizations, even the ones who get it. Well, it, it will usually be just a subset of that company. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, choice, you know, people, you have the, you know, you have the grammar and punctuation, Nazis, you know, kind of thing, you know, kind of really, you know, who think that language is of.
Is is a certain way and should be frozen in aspect. And that's it, nothing changes, you know, a and you know, I'm not saying grammar and punctuation aren't important, but that [00:07:00] you can have something that is perfectly punctuated, that, that follows. Whatever prescriptive grammar you are following. And, and that piece of writing can completely fail and, and, and, and get no results.
So it's not the, it's not the most important thing. You know, I say to people, understanding grammar is to communicating. What's understanding a workshop manual is to driving a car. It, you know, it it's it's of course it's important. What's what's happening under the hood and somebody needs to understand it.
But it's still not gonna get you from a to B. So there's that. And, and really, I think that the reason that I'm spending all this time now writing about this and researching this is partly because I, I don't. Even in those organizations, most people don't realize how much writing they do and therefore how, what opportunity there is to optimize what they're doing to, and therefore optimize how the company [00:08:00] runs even, you know, increase profits.
It it's one of those things that's just hidden in plain sight. We just don't see what we're doing all day. But fortunate. You know, there are people who do recognize that and, and that they get an edge, but it's also one of those things you only really get once you. Once you see it, once you see the change, you know, once you see a piece of writing that you thought was okay.
Yeah. And then you, you learn how to work on it and then you kind of go and people have said this. Oh okay. I get it now. You know, I can't believe that I. Ever, let that go out as it was before, because wow. That was gonna be really tiring to read or very easy to ignore. Yeah. And it really, you know, I can see that by fine tuning it like that.
It, it transforms the effectiveness, the effecti and because we're doing it all day. You know, it's the, it's the rising tide that lifts all boats. You know, if you work on written communication,
Matthew Dunn: I I'll give you, I'll give you a straw, man. You may be familiar with this, but I'll give you a straw man. So we can sort of finish whacking on why businesses [00:09:00] should do this.
Cuz I totally agree. Amazon headquarter, just south of me here has a fairly well known practice for big projects of the, the, the way a project gets kicked off is the person who's spearhead. Comes in with a written memo. I believe it's six pages max and everybody in the meeting sits and reads it and then discusses it.
And I know from, you know, having read about Amazon, they were a client for a previous company of mine. There's a lot of work into the writing of that six pager cuz the entire thing could be bazillion dollar project we'll pivot on whether or. that that communicates well. And it seems like an example of, yeah, this is worth doing.
Would you.
Rob Ashton: Oh, absolutely. And I've I've, I've seen that, you know, I've heard of that too. I've heard it was instigated by Jeff Bezos himself. I dunno if I dunno if that's true or not. But yeah, absolutely. And I think if [00:10:00] you, if you can get that down to that six pages. Yeah. And really you want to be able to sell it on the first page, you know, you don't wanna be relying on.
If you haven't got them by the end of the first page, then you, you're probably on the back foot and you may never catch up. But it's what people do is, and, and what this overcomes is they tend to just assume that writing is a question of transferring data from one brain to another. Yeah. And therefore, if you just put the information.
Then it will somehow magically work. And when you are forced to whittle it down then you know, that can be very powerful. I, I would say though, I would, I would caution that it's not just about brevity and sometimes longer is better. And this is one of the things that is a bit of a misconception about effective writing.
That short is always better. And particularly, and if you think about things that are, that that would, are really stripped down to their bare bones, you know, with devoid of maybe devoid of context, devoid of narrative, They, they, they [00:11:00] were quite likely to fall flat and I'm thinking there, for instance, of, of bullets, people often use bullets, just a series of bullets because they think this, this will make it short.
So I just write in bullets. And in fact there was a oh, there, there was an, a piece of writing. It was a blog post on the HBR blog a few years ago, which was about writing like the military. And it, it went viral, you know, it really. It really got shared far and wide, you know, people were saying, yeah, yeah, I really like that.
And they were saying things like, you know, bottom line up front, which is very much a military thing. Certainly in the us and, and British military you know, tell me, gimme the bottom line first and then justify, which is not actually how you persuade anybody. You know, if I say to you, you know, I'm gonna say this widget and it, it, it costs $300.
Do you want it? Okay. Now let me tell you why, you know, immediately. You're kind of going well, no, no, I don't want it. And all your defenses are up, you know? So, so you know, bottom line up front doesn't always work, right. Just using bullets is rarely works because. [00:12:00] It's a bit like trying to learn from somebody else's revision notes.
You know, it's kind of, if you've been in a lecture and you've made some notes, they'll mean something to you, you hand them to someone else probably won't mean anything to that person. Right. It's the same with bullets. They are summaries of your thoughts, not summaries of anybody else's. So they don't connect for that reason.
And they, I mentioned narrative. You know, as well as I do the importance of story in, in how we make decisions, we tell ourselves stories all the time. And I mean, all the time, you know, you're walking down the street, you're telling yourself a story with you is the, you, you are the hero of your own story, you know?
And if you read something that has no story, because you need story to make sense of it, you're gonna create your. and it could be, I dunno why this person is sending me this, you know, I don't understand these notes, this person doesn't either, does this person know what he's talking about? Or I don't know, is this important?
And you've got that inner narrative, which has got [00:13:00] nothing to do with what's being written and, and your reader is making up themselves and you completely lost control. And that's one of the big mistakes that people make when they're trying to be brief. So to say, you know, brevity is laudable. And certainly most documents are way too long.
So yeah, shoot for that. But but it's not the end of the pardon? The pardon? It's not the end of the story, right?
Matthew Dunn: It's not the end of the story. This is a funny thing to drag in, cuz it's, it's more than just writing, but that previous company I mentioned where Amazon among others were a client. I founded one of the co-founded one of the first companies to do what everybody now calls explainer videos.
2009, say it visually. And so for, for five years, great run. We had companies mostly fortune 100 coming out of the woodwork as, as video was just starting to take off. And we'll, we'll get outside of words, into other parts of media eventually, maybe. But what they were hiring us to do [00:14:00] was to communicate their thing clearly compellingly in two or.
Minutes. And it was a, it was a fun ride to learn how to do that with them. And among the things I discovered one frequently, they couldn't get out of their own way. The people who knew the subject best were the biggest pain. On the project because they, they couldn't put a boundary around it. They wanted to shove the encyclopedia into a match book.
Like you, it won't work guys. Sorry, it won't work. They had no priority. We want this and this and this and this and this. I'm like fine. You get three, which are the three important ones. Well, we want more than three. Sorry, you don't get more than three, which like, what's the important thing. And then putting a narrative structure.
which like, and sometimes they've felt like, oh, well, we can't possibly do that. I said, if we don't do that, no one's gonna pay any attention. Like if we can't find or create the storyline that carries this thing, it's [00:15:00] not gonna work. Right. It'll be, it'll be just facts with decorative characters and no one's gonna, no one's gonna care or they're not gonna remember it.
And sometimes I felt like our job was to not know their subject and bring some rigor and structure. And method and, and frankly, to charge 'em enough where we had the where we had the right to say, Nope, too bad. This is how it works. I got to where I would send drafts back, particularly the legal departments as PDFs, not, not as editable documents because particularly legal departments.
They always wanted a fricking. with the wording. I'm like a, you can't write dialogue for you, like for shit. Sorry. so no, you don't get to reword my stuff and you don't know why this is structured the way it's structured. So I'm gonna give you a PDF. Give me all the notes you want, but don't mess with my don't mess with my dialogue pal.
You don't know how to do it. [00:16:00] And it was, it was fascinating and it was a lens on why so many, why so much written communication stinks in a. Because you look at the cloud of, of cloud, of writing around a project like that. If the end result is 150, 200 word script, you know, we spent thousands of words getting there.
And in a sense, the job was sort of trying to find the, the golden nugget amidst to all of the dirt involved in decisions about what the gold nugget was. Excuse me. So yeah, that's, that's that's fascinating. talk to me a bit about the other side of it, which is how we read and how that might have changed in the last 20.
Rob Ashton: Yeah, I, I, I just, I wanted to just re respond, first of all, just briefly to this idea of wanting to get too much information in and you know, you, we have this, this thing of elusory. It's called losery [00:17:00] superiority, if you don't know very much about something yeah. You overestimate how much, you know, and this is all over the web, you know, people, you know, you have people who are experts have experts having scare quotes who who've read a few, few blog posts, you know, and think they know all there is to know about that.
Yeah. So called Dunning Kruger effect. Yes. Less. We know the more we think we know, but there is a flip side to that, which is a losery Sierras losery superiority. The flip side is a losery inferiority where the more we know the, the more we, we underestimate, how much we know, you know, we kind of, we think that we don't know that much because we know how much else there is to know.
And so and in doing that, you, you, you overestimate how much other people know, so that, that's why you get that problem where people's, you know, where people just want to pile in all this information because they, they overestimate how much capacity people have. Yeah. Yeah. And incidentally, when you, when you are encountering a, a topic for the first time, you're relying largely on your working memory.
Yes. And your [00:18:00] working memory does not have much capacity at all. Right. And what you're trying to do is keep that there. So I, I saw this, I went to a an evening talk a year ago, I think it was possibly long ago, but it was on quantum computing and my son was interested in it at the time and took him along.
And this guy started talking about quantum computing and I think I was about oh, 10 sentences in, before I just reached max. You know, I was kind of. Oh, okay. I, you know, I dunno, hang on a minute because they were all new concepts. They were, I was it's like I was opening new files for each piece of information.
Yeah. And I was trying to hold it in my working memory and you know, and EV every now and then I kind of get overloaded and I go, come on, Rob, come on. You know, let's go again. And it didn't work because it was all new. It, we used to think that We had capacity for around seven pieces of, of information in our working memory.
It's it's we now know it's more like three or four, [00:19:00] you know, it's not very much, you know, when you said three priorities, you know, you were right. You were absolutely right, because you can't take in much more than that, but we do it all the time and this is. This is part of the problem and this, I think it's also part of the problem why people don't realize they need to fine tune how they're writing, because they just think, well, I'm just giving them the information and it's perfectly clear, isn't it?
You know, and if I give them the information, they'll get the information and, and the way we go in terms of how we read this is, again, we, we don't, there's, there's quite a lot known about this. And it's not, but it, but it's not something that most people know. So, so researchers know quite a lot about this neuroscientists, psychologists physiologists atomist, but not people, not the general public so that there is, and it's really, really, I.
because how we read is largely prediction. So what we read initially is what we're [00:20:00] expecting to see there. And then we, and then we correct. And th this goes back to, ah, the, the 1850s. There's a guy called Herman V Helmholtz. He's a, a German polymath He looked at the structure of the eye and, and said, I don't think that that, that the structure of the eye is sophisticated enough.
I mean, it's a wonderful. What, you know, what, you know, a wonderful thing, the, the, the, the human eye or, or the eye of any animal. But it's not sophisticated enough. He said for, to, for it, to, to account for the pictures we see in our heads, there's so much information around us so much, you know, so many images that, you know, if you just, if it were just the eye, we were relying.
It, it wouldn't work. And it was, ah, David Eagleman, the neuroscientist did a, a thing on PBS a few years ago called the, I think it was called the human brain or something like that. And he did this lovely thing where he took a digital camera [00:21:00] and he was just, I think he was in Manhattan and he just took a, he just said, right.
Okay. I'm looking around. And my eye is, is, you know, I'm just scanning everything. So I know what I'll do. I'll just take a few quick videos. Of of what I'm seeing. And he just kind of pointed to camera in the way his eyes would, you know, just scanning their horizon and then looked at the videos afterwards.
And of course it was just a mess, but that was literally recording. What was there? So the, most of our, most of what we see is in the brain, the brain is a, you know, it's, it's. Making the pictures for us and it relies on what's gone, what we've seen before it relies on what we're expecting to see, therefore and even you can see this at the neuroscience level.
It it's when, when you measure the signal from the eyes, when you're reading. There's a signal first from the prefrontal cortex bef you know, the few milliseconds before before the signal from the eyes. And there's also 10 times as much signal coming [00:22:00] from the visual cortex. Yes, yes. 10 times as much from the, you know, from that then from the eyes themselves.
So this is all happening and then we're using the eyes to update, update the picture. Really?
Matthew Dunn: I'm gonna, I'm gonna restate what you just said. , this is like one of those put a frame around it for, especially if someone's listening and doesn't it. Doesn't get to see our facial expression. The brain tells the eye what to see.
Rob Ashton: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. 100%.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Reading and walking through your kitchen and whatever else, but really exceptionally. So I.
Rob Ashton: Yeah. I mean, you see it with, I mean, this is why this is why magicians are able to do their job. Yeah. You know, they misdirect attention and you see what you're expecting to see elsewhere.
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. With reading particularly it it's, it definitely, you know, it has even more of an effect and, and the, the reason is that we didn't evolve to read and [00:23:00] write. Right. So we don't have a structure in our brain. That that from birth is devoted to reading and writing. You know, we, we we have, what, what we have is when we learn to read is a kind of a connecting together and creating multiple networks that join up things that, you know, structures in the brain that we evolve for other things.
So certainly you know, the visual cortex Sarah bellum controlling the movement of the eyes, but also the auditory areas of the brain. Because when we're reading, we're using, we're not just accessing an in a dictionary, which we have to build up which there's a theory that even that in a dictionary is actually recycling an area that we, that we evolve for something else.
But that, but also the sound so it's, there are two roots when we're reading it's we, we, with words that are familiar, we, we just access them from our diction. With other words, we, we actually hear the sounds [00:24:00] so, and the two go together and, and also, you know, puns would never work if we, if we weren't relying on sound, you know, if you saw, if you read read a pun, you know, you wouldn't get it.
You wouldn't find it funny if you weren't kind of going, oh yeah. You know, it's, it's spelled that way, but actually it's referring to the other word that sounds exactly the same, but has felt differently that would not work if you were not hearing the sound in your brain when you are reading. So all of this is happen.
And, you know, that's the reason that you, yeah, it takes so long to learn, to read and, and incidentally, you will pick up your. Your spoken language, you'll pick that up passively just by being around people who are speaking, you know, and you listen to them. But that won't happen with reading. You know, you have to be taught actively ha how to do it.
You know, you have to be, and it takes, and it takes years. And that's because you are rewiring your brain and you can see this, you know, if you see something in an alphabet that say you're not familiar say, say Arabic or Hebrew or Russian, whatever. When you look at that, you could look at [00:25:00] that. You could look at that all day, every day and you would still not learn to read it.
You would need someone to decode it for you literally. Well,
Matthew Dunn: it's like, it's like, it's that? It's that speed bump experience of reading something in archaic English. Where the SS look like gigantic Fs and your brain just goes clunk. When you hit that. Exactly. You go F in your head goes, what? No, F is not the plural, but there's a big F there.
It's not an F,
Rob Ashton: but right. Yeah. Yeah. You're not used to seeing it AB absolutely an issue. Say it just brings you to a, to a grinding
Matthew Dunn: halt by the way. Quick, quick backtrack about 14 seconds ago. I think it's in one of Kessler's books. He says a pun is two words joined by a string of sound. Yeah. Yeah. Like that one, huh?
Rob Ashton: Exactly. Yeah. It's lovely. Yeah. And it's, and you know, if you, if you. Find you might make a, a typo when you're writing and, and you might write down a word that [00:26:00] sounds the same, but has nothing yeah. To do. Yeah. And it could be a homophone. It could be, it could be a word that you know, sounds exactly the same, but it's spelled differently.
So, you know, two with two O's or one or a w. Right, right. But you know, it might also be a word that sounds kind of similar. So chain and change maybe or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's kind of, it's got, it's got, because the auditor sounds in common. Yeah. Phony and, and and that's because you are hearing it when you're writing.
So, so it's, so there's that. But there is also When you are reading the, the mechanics of reading limit. So it's not just a, you know, you've got, you've got the amount of information that the I can take in. You've got the mechanics, you've got this the way that the, the eyes read. So we read in these little jumps called ARDS.
Yes. And so we've, we've got this illusion and it is an illusion of reading something smoothly and seeing the whole thing that's just created in your brain. It's actually
exactly.
Matthew Dunn: Well, it's like the video camera you mentioned, right? It's like, here's this skyline. Whoa, that's horrible footage. Your brain was doing a Saada across the [00:27:00] skyline, telling the eye to see.
Pattern.
Rob Ashton: Absolutely. Yeah. And the point of fine focus, which is a small area of the Foer, which is very rich in, in cone, in cone cells. Yes. It, it's, it's tiny and there's only room there for, you know, might only be three or four letters. So, you know, if you stop when you're reading something and look and see how much is in sharp focus, It really is only a few letters normally, and, you know, if you're reading an email or something.
Yeah. And so, and there was a, you know, a mentioned science that people don't know about, you know, go back to 1975 or two scientists George MCON, George McConkey and Keith Rainer. And they, what they did is they kind of created this devilish device. It would, it used an eye tracker to work out where you were looking and it would replace everything else with complete nonsense, complete gibberish.
So if you were reading some texts on a screen, nice, it would, yeah, you would, it was a moving window of clarity where it was the acting text. It [00:28:00] should be there. And it was only, you know, it could be up to seven, eight letters. And as long as those were the right words, everything else was irrelevant. And in fact, what happened is the people, the volunteers in the experiment didn't know that there was anything wrong.
They didn't notice that everything else was complete gibberish. So it, you know, what that shows is that, you know, that is how we are reading this, this moving window of clarity, incidentally. That's why we miss huge typos. You know, partly because we're expecting to see it. Yes. Yeah, because of the limitations of the eye.
But also because even when you look at it carefully, it's only a small part that's in focus. And so you, you, and, and that is why we missed the biggest typos of all, you know, you can have something in, in, you know, 34. Type. And you think, how on earth did I miss it? It's in a huge headline on a slide in my presentation.
Yeah. Yeah. Why did I miss that? And it's because the fine point of focus would probably just be a small part of one letter. [00:29:00] So you can't, you can't get the whole letter in until of course you're presenting it and, and you know, everyone in a packed auditorium can see it because they've got the distance and they can fit it
Matthew Dunn: in well, and also because I'm, I'm guessing you you'd know the research.
I wouldn't, but I'm, I'm guessing that as. Prediction mechanism is working, right? You're not evaluating letter for letter, right? You're you're on the narrative flow or the language flow. And the fact that there's a letter that doesn't belong there. It doesn't right. That's not the structure I'm taking in.
I'm taking in the story. You're telling me who gives a crap about the extra.
Rob Ashton: Even though, you know, you can be extremely motivated and still miss it. It's yeah. You've got this really strong confirmation bias. Yeah. And you just assume that it's right. Even if you tell yourself I'm checking this carefully.
Yeah. I've done it, you've done it. You know, it's kind of, you, you check it 10 times and you think, how did I miss that? But you come back to it a few days later and it's a different story. You know, you, you, you then spot it. But when you're in the. [00:30:00] What you are doing is you are using all of your knowledge yeah.
To and overlaying that. Yeah. Cause you, can't not overlay
Matthew Dunn: your knowledge. Sorry. You can't not overlay your knowledge.
Rob Ashton: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that leads me onto a. Another example, actually, which is that there's a, a study, I think it's about 30 years ago now. Elizabeth Newton at Stanford it's called tapers and li listeners.
Have you ever heard of this?
Matthew Dunn: Yes. Yes. I've put this one. I'm so delighted to hear you bring that up. Yes.
Rob Ashton: So do, so do you wanna tell the story of, shall I,
Matthew Dunn: You tell it cuz you sound a lot better?
Rob Ashton: our voice is okay. Yeah, it it's. What what this, this researcher did was she was trying to test how much, what we hear in our brain influences what we think other people can hear in terms when we're.
I mean, it was literally with sound. So what she asked them to do is she said, look, if you tap out a wellknown tune I dunno on a desk or [00:31:00] whatever, if you, if you tap just the rhythm of that tune, how likely is it? Is that the person listening to that will be able to name that tune. And, and they were.
They were tuned that people would know, you know, I dunno star span or banner, but it's, you know, things happy birthday, you know, things that were, would be familiar. And, and when you're tapping that out, you know, if you are kind of singing happy birthday in your head and tapping that out, you just think how could no?
Oh, this is gonna be so obvious. Yeah. How can you not get this? Yes. A and the, so, so she asked people to, to estimate, you know, how many people out of a hundred will be able to get that. And the average was people thought 50, 50%, 50 out of a hundred would be able to identify these tunes. And in fact that that the actual number was 2.5% as the average wasn't two and a half people, but you, you know, it it's, it was, it was a fraction of the, you know, we, we vastly vastly overestimate how easy it is for people to [00:32:00] understand.
What we are, you know, the information we're giving them because we've got the tune in our head. Yes. And we can't, we can't not hear it. You say, you know, you can't, it it's. Have you ever done something where you were where you're gonna travel somewhere and you were looking forward to a vacation you'd never been there before.
And you kind of have in your mind what, what that's, what that place is gonna be like. Yeah. And you think about it and you imagine yourself there and you think, ah, it's gonna be amazing. And then you go, and of course, it's, it's very different from your, from your model. You know, there'll be some things of the same, but it's not the same as you imagined it.
It was bound to be different. Have you ever tried to then go back to what you, to, to that picture that you had in your mind? Before you went there, it, you can't, you can't unknow it. You cannot unknow it. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's true of all our knowledge, you know, you can forget some stuff, but you can't go back to where you were before you learned it.
And so it's, you know, and that's why it's very difficult to put yourself in the shoes of the reader. But it's also [00:33:00] why we do miss these, these mistakes. Because as you say, you know, you, can't not predict it. You can't not see it. Your brain is saying, yep. Been there, done that. It's fine. Let's just move on.
Come on. This looks great. And, and it's all comes down to prediction prior knowledge and the way the brain reads, not the eyes, the brain.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. I want to take the, how people read thread one step farther and I'm, and I'm keeping the audience for this for this series in mind, you know, email marketers, business professionals as an avid reader, as obviously you are it bugs me to watch my own reading habits.
Not degraded. Exactly, but, but shifted so much in the last 20, 30 years as I read more and more onscreen in chunks and where I was, the kid who'd get lost in a book and still as adult do I skim and scan with the best of them. I sit down and go flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip through the New York [00:34:00] times in about that length of time.
I didn't read it. I don't know what you call what I did. , but it wasn't what I used to call reading. And yet I spend more time in the, in the skimming now than I do the concentrated focused. Sit your butt down and read this material. And it, it does worry me a bit. And yet email marketers have to write to the skimmer more than the reader.
I think reaction.
Rob Ashton: Oh, oh, definitely. Definitely. There was some some, a big piece of research funded by by the EU, which, which, you know, lots of combined, lots of studies. And it found that when we are reading on screen, That works really well generally, unless it's something that's quite emotive or it's something that's cognitively challenging and then we find it easier to read in hard copy.
So, you know, there is definitely something different about, about reading on [00:35:00] screen. And yet, as you say, You know, that's who, that's, who you're trying to reach. Whe when you are, when you are writing these emails. So you have to bear that in mind. Yeah. You, and you have to, I always say to people, you know, people will read until they can stop reading and then they will and you, you know, you.
And the job of every sentence really is to get people to read the next sentence, you know, hook them in, keep them reading. It's like trying to bump, start a car. The most difficult thing is to get them to read in the first place. And then you, then it has a momentum of its own. So, but don't put stuff in there.
That's gonna bring them to a, to a Jing hole. Yeah. So yeah. You know, an example would be you know, a word that's, that's gonna. Probably unfamiliar to them or a word that's in all capitals, you know, it's kind of, you can read it, you can read capitals as much as easily as you can read stuff in you know, in lowercase or upper lowercase, but it will stand out and it will.
And so every time they see that it's going, it is going chop, chop, chop, you know, and it's giving it's giving. It's kind of [00:36:00] almost drawing attention to itself. Good. Writing's invisible, you know, you should, you should read it without without trying or without even wanting to read it, you know, it's, it should draw you in and you're not aware that you are reading.
Be because of this idea that we didn't evolve to read and write reading is much harder than we think. And so it's much easier to, just to skim onto the next thing. Just as you know, just as if you're, if you're going down your to-do list during the day and you hit something that's a bit difficult, it's much easier to just change to something else or check the news or check social media.
That's what the brain does when something gets a bit difficult. It, it, it looks for a break and if you're reading an email, it's gonna. Ah, yeah. You know, I'll, I'll read that later. I I'm just gonna look at the next one or I'm gonna make a cup of coffee or whatever it is. Yeah. So you need to make something flow, but there is something that there's another reason you should do that.
There's something called the fluency heuristic, which, which says that the, the [00:37:00] easier something is to process, the more likely we are. To believe it and to, and, and to just accept it. So if you've got to work hard, then we kind of think harder about the content. And we might think, and, and in thinking harder, we might just conclude very quickly that we can't be bothered with it and we're gonna do something else.
But if something flows and it's easy to process, we equate easy to process with. True. So that's great, you know, If I say to you how many people live in the Australian capital of Sydney? Is it, is it a million, 3 million or 5 million? And you might start answering the question, but actually the, the answer is none of those because the Australian capital of Sydney is Canberra.
The Australia, the Australian capital is Canberra, not, not Sydney. So what you, what the brain does, is it, it, it answers the question. That's easy to answer rather than looking carefully at the information. So you know, this, you just, you just see this all the time. You know, some, but if something is easy to process and [00:38:00] you, so in, in other words, flipping that if you make it easy to process, if you write it well, if you make it flow, there you go.
If you hook people in, if you keep them reading, they're more likely to accept it. And, and you really, I can't stress this enough. You know, you really need to be very disciplined about this. Try to park your, or overcome your confirmation bias. Look at it the next day, looking at the day after, read it out loud, read it out loud.
AB absolutely send it to yourself in another format. You know, it's like a screenshot and, you know, look at it as a, as a screenshot. Just anything you can to kind of override that confirmation bias. Send it send the email to yourself to, to see what it will look like. You know, when somebody else receives it, look at what the subject line will look like on your phone.
and think if you know, is, are the first, I mean, you've got, I think you have about 40 characters in a, the email on an iPhone screen, you know, if it's in, if it's in portrait. Yeah. You know, what are the words at the beginning? And are they leading you to, you know, [00:39:00] do they want to make you open it? It's, you know, this has been over overdone, of course, for things like click bait, but originally, you know, it got the term clickbait because people would click on it, you know?
So, so there are still things you can learn, you know, certainly using curiosity So, you know, look at those first few words of your subject line and think as, as that person is scanning down their inbox, do those are those first few words going? Not the whole, not the whole subject, just the first two or three words.
Are they gonna make people want to read the rest? You know, that's, it's so, so important to be, to be aware of that. It's like a Netflix. Effect, isn't it, you know, you've got all these, all these different things on, on cable TV, and we, as a result, we don't land on any of them. We just keep going to the next one.
Yeah. Yeah, because we can't decide. So you've gotta make them decide just to take a, take a chance. And then when you've got them get 'em reading that first sentence and then keep them reading.
Matthew Dunn: We could, we could do this for [00:40:00] hours. I swear to God really could. This is really awesome. I'm trying to think of some, some sort of tail off things watching the clocks. I don't, I don't tie up your whole evening. Okay. One, if you are gonna give very encapsulated advice, sort of why you're doing what you're doing now, what would you say particularly to people?
Because I think the audience for this podcast is mostly folks in, in some part of business. Like what do you tell them about reading and writing? How do you distill what you're learning? Right. It's
Rob Ashton: reading is something that is incredibly powerful. You know, you're seeing dots and squiggles on a screen and you're hearing a voice in your head.
It's a lot harder than we think. So that that miracle is a miracle of adapt. Not [00:41:00] evolution. It's something the effort of that decreases, but it never goes away. And it it's very easy to, to forget that. However, it, it is something that gives you the opportunity to lead the voice in someone's head to, to influence them, to get the decision you want, but you don't do it by viewing it as transferring data.
From your head to theirs. Yeah. You've got to do it by synchronizing your brain with theirs. And that can be done. It's not easy, but if you learn more about it and you, you and with practice and delving into these, some of these topics, you can get a, you, you, you get a much better chance of doing that.
And if that sounds daunting, I would, I would say the encouraging bit is most people aren't doing. , you know, most people don't get this. [00:42:00] Most people are taking it for granted. So if you delve into this and you start to be to, to improve your knowledge and to, and to, and to start to understand some of these mechanisms and the, and the techniques that, that go with them, then you give yourself a, you give yourself a winning edge and you only need to win by a nose, just like a horse reading winning a race.
you know, you only. Yeah, that small advantage and most people aren't doing it. So it is within reach. You know, you don't have to do what I've done and dedicate your life to it. You know, there are things you can do. And every, every one thing you do, they stack up, they all help. So just doing one of the things or being aware of one of the things that I've mentioned today will, will definitely give you a competitive edge.
And as I say, It goes across right across the board. It's the, it's the rising tide that lifts all boats. If you can, if you focus on this, it won't just help you in your marketing. It will help you in your execution. It will help you in your strategy. Yeah. The, the, the whole [00:43:00] shebang operations, you know, it's the, it connects everything together.
Because we write all the time and we read all the time and we don't speak to each other. This is the golden thread. This is the thing that can, that. Tie it all together.
Matthew Dunn: Nice. And you know, I, I see evidence supporting exactly what you said in some unexpected places. For example I, I run a SAS software company and I've been involved with a few groups that are essentially how to make your SAS software business work better.
And the top piece of advice is. talk to your customers, live with them, understand them, you know, write down what they say, which really amounts to, you know, like get on their wavelength and be in sync with them.
Rob Ashton: Yeah. And, you know, adds that, you know, use their
Matthew Dunn: language and use their language. In fact, the advice is explicitly essentially pick up [00:44:00] and steal their language.
If a customer says, you know, whatever squiggle you go, like, why do I keep hearing squiggle? Maybe we should use SQUI. As a key word, why. They're using it.
Rob Ashton: Absolutely. And that contradicts the contrary advice to, to the common advice to not use jargon, you know, because if you are using the customer's jargon, customer's jargon.
Yeah. The customer's jargon, not yours, not
Matthew Dunn: yours. Yes.
Rob Ashton: You know, so you, you can use that to be, you know, of course you can really screw that up and, and use it incorrectly. So you. Get someone to check it, but, but at least listen to those things, listen to how they describe their problems. Yes. And describe their problems in their terms, not yours in their terms.
And you will only do that by talking to them. That's the only way to do it. You can't, again, you can't unhea what's in your head,
Matthew Dunn: which, and you just said it so that I was hoping we'd have a chance to at least touch on it. That, that bridge between verbal language and written language that, that we kind of, we have to do.
As a person, you [00:45:00] there's no other way to get there. It it's, it still fascinates me how talking and writing are not the same thing. And you must know a bunch of research about this. Like they coexist, they, they affect each other fundamentally, but they're not the same. It's almost not the same language. I.
Rob Ashton: but what we do often use yeah. Different terminology, different sentence structures. And if you hear somebody, if, if you hear somebody speak or rather if you transcribe exactly what they've said yes. When you read the transcript, it doesn't make sense. And yet when you were listening to them, it did made perfect sense.
So, so, you know, there's something else going on going on there. But it it's. Yeah, we did. We evolved to speak and. Yes. So this is something we are hardwired to do. So it's different in that respect, there's even evidence that, that the, the, the release of hormones is different in, in writing. I believe that I believe there was have you ever been stuck in a kind of a tense exchange of email or [00:46:00] slack messages or whatever?
Text messaging? Yeah. And you're trying to resolve. And, you know, why do we do this? We just, we just stay texting, you know, trying to resolve it when, if we literally, if we took that phone from, in front of us and just moved it up to our ear, we could, we could, we could resolve it. Yeah. But you know, when you actually speak to somebody often, what happens is you feel this kind of relief wash, washing over you.
Yeah. And you kind of go, oh, alright. And you shoulders drop and you go, oh, see what I see what you mean. Oh yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And you work it out. Well, There's some research that, that, that suggests that when we are listening to the human voice, we release oxytocin which, which is something that's really central to, to how we interact as human beings.
But when we're reading, when we're reading, when we're reading text messages from those same people, We don't release oxytocin that yeah. You know, which makes sense because there's nothing less natural than reading and writing you know, and yet we, yet we are wired to speak and listen,
and
Matthew Dunn: yet this is, this is what, [00:47:00] what you're doing.
I'm, I'm watching the clock and I hate to, cause like I said, I seriously could type your whole evening, but where do you want to take what you're doing now in, in terms of impact on others, you could call that business. You could call that mission. You could call it chicken salad, but where are you headed with?
Rob Ashton: It's this, this will hopefully find its way into a book. So that's the end game for me is, is a book. And but something that, not just people who are, you know, fascinated by grammar and punctuation. You know, I'm not, I'm not trying to preach the choir here. This is something that just feels much bigger than that.
And so really what I'm trying to do is to, is to get this message out there and yeah, you know, I'm doing a lot of work and, and it's, I'm writing about it on my blog. I've put together a some free training as well. But it's it's, that's the, that is the. You know, this, and this could take me, this could take me the rest of my life.
You know, it's just something it's certainly a big enough topic for that. And it's, and it's not going away. [00:48:00] So yeah, I'm just really everything I can to get this message out there and make people more aware of of this research.
Matthew Dunn: Terrific. I'm gonna talk to you for a minute after we stop recording, but Rob, this was wonderful.
Thank you so much for connecting and
Rob Ashton: conversing. You you're. You're welcome. Can I just mention actually, if people want to want to sign up for that course they just go to Rob ashian.com/influence. Yeah. It's called silent influence and it's, it's all in there and that's probably the best way to keep, keep on top of this, but no, Matthew it's been, it's been an absolute pleasure and thanks so much for inviting me.
Terrific.
Matthew Dunn: My. Rob, Rob Ashton, Rob ashton.com. And I am signing up for silent influence as soon as I finish talking with Rob, Rob. Thanks. We'll cut the recording.