Week 6: The Reader's Reply Calculation
The reader's cost-benefit calculation for replying, worked through as a framework, with the semester's one slide deck.
15 March 2027
Weeks 2 through 5 named individual craft failures. This lecture steps back and gives the reader’s decision an actual shape: every opened email gets weighed against what replying costs, and most cold email is optimised for the sender’s side of that weighing and never touches the reader’s. The full workthrough is on the slide deck linked above.
Before the lecture
This is just to get a quick understanding before the lecture. The examples and the rest are in the lecture, so it’s advisable you attend.
In brief#
This week’s failure is having no reply incentive: an email that costs the reader real time to answer while offering them nothing back for spending it. The lecture names a rough framework, relevance times specificity divided by length, for finding which term is actually weak before you rewrite anything. It matters because writers usually fix the term that’s easiest to fix rather than the one that’s actually broken, and a rewrite that targets the wrong term wastes the effort.
Outline#
- the reader’s time-cost math for replying at all
- a reply-likelihood framework: relevance, specificity, length
- a worked example, and diagnosing which term is actually weak
- what would have had to change, and why fixing the wrong term wastes a rewrite