PRIMAL WRITING. Eight Secrets from Science to Write Like a Pro

Expanded from a highly popular article in Harvard Business Review, PRIMAL WRITING: Eight Secrets from Science to Write Like a Pro by Bill Birchard will reveal the secrets of effective writing through understanding the core brain science evidence of what entices readers to read in the first place.

This is a fresh, indispensable guide to communicating in a manner that truly engages and persuades. Because the techniques are based on hard scientific evidence, the book will be both particularly appealing and useful to individuals in the business world. Not writers by trade, their primary objective is to communicate as effectively as possible in order to win over their audience and get each person to understand and embrace their message. The book will provide the essential tools to accomplish this. As Birchard writes, science tells us that “readers hunger for words and phrases and sentences in the same way that we hunger for food, friends, family, and sex. This hunger is rooted in a brain mechanism responsible for motivation. To communicate with impact, the secret is to play to this mechanism. When you do it right, you give readers mental enjoyment.” As a result, you have their attention and can most effectively communicate. In Primal Writing, Birchard explores the hard science behind this key discovery and gives every writer, regardless of who their audience is, ta step by step system to accomplish their goal. Birchard is the first to collect and translate the this highly important research from diverse scientific studies and make it accessible to all. He initially discussed this unique, science-based approach to writing in his post for Harvard Business Review, “Write to Reward Your Reader,” https://hbr.org/2020/11/write-to-reward-your-reader. In its first week online, the article reached #1 on HBR's “most popular” list. The 35,000 web hits after the first few months revealed a strong interest in the book's topic. In summer 2021, HBR then published Birchard's full-length article: https://hbr.org/2021/07/the-science-of-strong-business-writing. Again, the heavy internet traffic, as well as subsequent requests for interviews and webinars, affirmed a strong book-buying audience among a core segment of business readers. Bill Birchard has worked as writing coach and book consultant for 25 years, serving a range of thought leaders, and developing a two-part workshop with a systematic process to help others develop their ideas at book length. Among his clients were faculty at Dartmouth College's business and medical schools. Birchard's journalism has appeared in Fast Company, CFO, Strategy+Business (now Strategy&, Enterprise), and other magazines. His experience for Primal Writing comes from decades of writing trade books, articles, op-eds, and blogs, and working on over twenty books of nonfiction, principally about management, economics, business, policy, technology, and the environment. His book titles include Merchants of Virtue (Palgrave Macmillan), Nature's Keepers (Jossey-Bass), The One-Minute Meditator (De Capo), and Counting What Counts (Basic Books). His titles as collaborator include the New York Times bestseller The Discipline of Market Leaders (Addison-Wesley (Basic Books) which sold over 800,000 copies, Ethics for the Real World (Harvard Business Press), Strategic Capitalism (McGraw-Hill), The Unfinished Leader (Jossey-Bass), and The Mathematical Corporation (PublicAffairs/Hachette).