Writing for a reader who has an AI too

Your reader is busy and may be summarising you with AI, so write short, structured, checkable messages, and never send workslop.

Shorter gets answered

In an experiment, researchers emailed 7,002 school board members asking them to fill in a survey. The 127-word version got a 2.7% response rate; the 49-word version got 4.8%. When 166 professionals were shown a long and a short version of a message, 165 said they would deal with the short one first.

Make the ask impossible to lose

Put the ask and the deadline in the first line.One request per message, so a summary can't drop the second.Specifics over adjectives: "Approve the £400 quote by Thursday", not "Let me know your thoughts".

Don't send workslop

Researchers at BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab coined "workslop": AI-generated work that looks polished and complete but is unhelpful, low quality or off the mark. In their survey, 40% of employees said they had received some in the last month, and dealing with each instance took close to two hours. Ab…

Don't play "spot the AI"

In six experiments with 4,600 people, participants could not tell AI-written self-descriptions from human ones, and relied on misleading cues such as first-person pronouns and contractions. Judge a message, yours or theirs, by whether it's accurate and useful, not by whether it sounds machine-made.

The short version

Fewer words get more replies.Lead with the ask and the deadline; one ask per message.Never forward AI output you haven't checked and understood.Nobody reliably spots AI text; judge accuracy and usefulness instead.

Try it in Kanvo

Before you send a long message in Kanvo, ask the assistant to "cut this to three lines with the ask first", then check it still says what you mean. To see what someone else's long message asks of you, open its ⋯ → Ask Kanvo → Explain this.

Sources

A 49-word email to 7,002 school board members got a 4.8% response rate against 2.7% for a 127-word version; 165 of 166 professionals would deal with the concise message first.