Now that you've had a chance to see the videos connecting writing with mapping, I want to push this idea a little further by pointing to an experiment mentioned in the best-selling book Switch by two brothers, Chip Heath who teaches at the Stanford Business School and Dan Heath who teaches at Duke. The experiment involved a food drive on a college campus. The point was to see if small changes in the way the food drive was advertised could increase the amount of donations. One announcement for the food drive contains some generic instructions to bring a can of food to where the drive was being held which was a well-known place on campus, something like the Student Union. The other announcement was much more detailed in ways that helpfully preview the benefits of a writing principle we'll explore in a few weeks, the Power of the Particular. The second announcement switch "can of food," which is pretty general, to the much more specific "can of beans." It also included the suggestion that the recipients think of a time they were going to be near the drop-off spot so they wouldn't have to go out of their way to make their donation. And getting back to our idea of writing and mapping, it included something that I think was the most brilliant of all: an actual map to the drop-off spot. It is probably no surprise that the second announcement, the one with the map and details, produced many more donations than the more nonspecific announcement. But here is what is really surprising about the experiment and also what highlights the power of a well crafted message. Before distributing the two announcements, the researchers sent surveys to students in the dorm who were going to receive them. The survey asked the students to identify which of the people in the dorm were most likely to make a donation and which were least likely to make one. Taking the responses as a proxy for charitableness, the researchers used the term "Saints" to describe the students identified as the most likely to donate and they used the term "Jerks" to describe the students identified as the least likely to donate. The researchers then checked who actually made a donation. Here's what they found. Of the Saints who received the generic announcement, so no map, 8% donated. Of the Jerks who received the generic announcement, so no map, 0% donated. Of the Saints who received the detailed announcement with the map, 42% donated. Of the Jerks who received the detailed announcement with the map, 25% donated. The key numbers there are the 8% and the 25%. Sending a detailed announcement to a Jerk was much more effective than sending a generic announcement to a Saint. As the Heath brothers put it, the researchers got the worst people in the dorm to donate simply by crafting a more concrete message. Or, as they wrote in somewhat more vivid terms, "If you're hungry and need a can of food, you're three times better off relying on a jerk with a map than on a budding young saint without one." What this means for writing is that we want to make sure our documents and even our emails and text messages are as user-friendly as possible. We want to make things easy on readers. We want to write and edit with empathy. I've included an optional essay, an assignment for those of you who want to explore this relationship between editing and empathy in greater detail. Both are materials I use in a class called Editing and Advocacy, which teaches students to use their writing to champion worthy causes and actually get people to do stuff. At its core is a message we have been stressing in this video. People are busy, people are stressed, people don't always have an abundance of time, patience or attention. So if you want to persuade them, if you want to help them make a certain decision or take a particular action, you need to lay out the steps in a clear, compelling way. You need to draw them a good map.