The Lesson I Learned (Again) Writing Letters to Voters

For the past month, I’ve been writing letters to people across the country, encouraging them to vote in the upcoming election.

In the letters, part of a Vote Forward initiative, I explain why I vote in one to three sentences. The idea is that people are more likely to vote if they hear from ordinary citizens. The letters don’t advocate for specific candidates or parties, but instead for values.

When I first began writing, my instinct was to fly high in rhetoric, emphasizing the importance of preserving our democracy and constitutional order. They were fine messages, but frankly, they were messages that anyone could have written.

It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t leaning into my comparative advantage: my own stories of people I know who will be affected by the election. Research by Vote Forward confirms that the most effective letters aren’t those that lecture—they are the ones that tell real, raw stories.

The best messages, it explains, are specific, authentic, and compelling. In other words, they are the messages only you and I can write.

In our overstuffed content world, it’s a lesson that I keep coming back to, especially when I’m writing on this platform or advising others on writing for it.

It’s not new, of course. We learn at an early age to tell stories and write what we know. My 9-year-old daughter is learning to write about little moments that loom large in our lives, emphasizing the importance of details and personal observations.

But maybe as we get older, we forget. Or maybe we start to discount or devalue our own experiences.

Technology isn’t helping. Over the summer, Google aired an ad showing a dad using Gemini to help his daughter write a fan letter to track and field star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

Sometimes, writing about our personal experiences can feel like donning a neon leotard and roller-skating through a crowd . It is uncomfortable, it makes us feel vulnerable, and yes—it might feel awkward at first. But it’s the authenticity that makes people remember you.

Matthew Dicks, a Moth StorySLAM champion, goes so far in his new book Stories Sell: Storyworthy Strategies to Grow Your Business and Brand to suggest that even when we’re telling stories of other people, we need to be telling our own story.

Why?

"Because telling stories about people other than yourself often amounts to a history lesson….Only by telling stories of ourselves can we demonstrate the vulnerability required to draw audiences close to us and make them feel connected to our experience."

That idea made me think of the author Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s work, including her recent absorbing New York Times magazine piece . It’s about her father’s childhood friend who was kidnapped at gunpoint on Long Island. But it’s also about how she has related to her own trauma.

The letter-writing experience has also reminded me that the best writing voices are intimate. You feel like they are talking to you. Seeing the names and addresses of people I was writing to helped center me. I pictured myself sitting in their living room, which forced me to take a different approach.

Here are a few examples of what I came up with:

• I vote because I want to honor my dad, who passed away last year. He was a social studies teacher who taught me and many others about the importance of citizens exercising their right to vote. We the people have the power.
• I vote because I don’t want my 9-year-old daughter to worry about gun violence when she goes to school. ?
• I vote because my 77-year-old mother depends on Social Security and Medicare. She worked as a nurse for over four decades, caring for others. She deserves to live the rest of her life with dignity. ?

These aren’t award-winning lines by any stretch. But they come closer to hitting the notes I want. And, who knows, it just might matter.

In 2021, Vote Forward conducted an experiment during a special election in New Mexico, aimed at identifying the most effective letter-writing strategy to motivate voter turnout. Trained volunteers wrote personal story letters, sharing life experiences to demonstrate how voting affects them, while other volunteers wrote standard letters. The results showed that personal story letters increased voter turnout by +0.8 percentage points compared to +0.4 points for standard letters, with both types contributing to a general turnout increase of +0.6 points.

Yes, a tiny difference, but when it comes to voter turnout, even a fraction of a percentage can change outcomes. It’s another reminder that our stories matter.