Ryan shares three writing tactics that help you be more effective at work
- Make the first line interesting
- show them why they should care immediately.
- you have to know your audience well to do this.
- examples
- (Sharing launch results): share the metric movements that the audience cares about.
- (Asking for collaboration): highlight the expected outcomes from the work that are most important to the audience.
- (Raising awareness for a problem): explain the severity of the problem in a way the audience understands.
- make your ask clear
- either share it first thing
- or at the end after providing the relevant context for them to understand your ask
- Before:
Service X is broken. I think it's because of the push. Could you help me revert a diff？ This change went out at Y time and I can see a clear drop in the success rate just after that. I'm not sure though still and want a second opinion
- After:
Prod is down, can you help me revert a diff？
Service X is broken. I think it's because of the push. This change went out at Y time and I can see a clear drop in the success rate just after that. I'm not sure though still and want a second opinion
- write simply
- the more simply the writing, the more your idea will get through to the audience
- if you can remove a word and preserve the meaning, do it
- if you can replace a complex word with a simple one, do it
these were for short writing, he shared more tactics for longer writing, i.e. planning docs, announcements, design docs, and more.
The main ideas are to include a tl;dr and format the writing to optimize for skimming (people skim in an F-shaped pattern)
- add a tl;dr: put what your audience must know in a few lines, the most important takeaways
- add a table of contents: for longer posts, let people jump to what they care about
- add section headings: gives people a sense of how relevant a section is
- use bullets and lists: much easier to skim than paragraphs, the spacing separates ideas clearly, delivering the key points to readers
- bold the main points: draw attention to what matters most, use your judgement and use appropriately
- break up long paragraphs: add line breaks where it makes sense, don't let paragraphs get too long
more tips in this article by Nielsen Norman group 5 Formatting Techniques for Long-Form Content
Lastly, you get better at writing by doing and asking for feedback by from people who write well.
Write, reflect on feedback, iterate.