communicating-in-writing

Communicating in Writing

Advisory and high-freedom: the layers below are thinking tools, not a sequence to execute. Work through intent, audience, and structure before drafting prose; craft comes last. Structure determines comprehension more than prose quality does — fix structure before fixing sentences.

Layer 1 — Intent

Establish before writing a word:

• Purpose — what the document must achieve, in one sentence. If there are multiple outcomes, rank them; a document with two equal purposes usually fails both.
• What changes — what the reader should know, believe, feel, or do after reading that they did not before. If you cannot state this, the writing is not ready to begin.
• Call to action — what you are asking the reader to do. Even informational documents have an implicit next step; surface it.
• Audience, document type, constraints — who reads it, what form it takes, what is non-negotiable.

Resolve all of these before drafting. A document begun without a clear purpose cannot be edited into shape — it needs rewriting once purpose is found.

Layer 2 — Audience

• Identify the primary reader (the decision-maker) and any secondary readers. For each: what do they know, what do they care about, what will they resist?
• Working memory holds roughly four new chunks at once. One idea per paragraph, lists of seven or fewer items, complex arguments broken into discrete steps.
• Prior knowledge determines structure, not just vocabulary. Experts tolerate dense sections and domain compression; non-experts need the same content in more sections, with scaffolding, analogy, and explicit transitions. Calibrate density to the reader, not to what feels natural to you as the expert.
• Mismatch signals: jargon the reader does not know, assumed context they do not have, detail level misaligned (too granular for an executive; too high-level for an implementer).

Layer 3 — Structure

• Lead with the answer. Conclusion or recommendation first, then reasoning and evidence. Exception — deliberate, not default: when the reader needs emotional or contextual preparation (bad news, controversial recommendations), build the case first.
• Each section answers exactly one question; split any section answering two. Headings signal what the section delivers, not its topic — "Three decisions required by Friday", not "Next steps".
• Test the through-line: can you state the document's argument in two or three sentences, in order? If not, the structure has a gap. For persuasive documents: situation → complication → question → answer.
• Persuasive documents work on three levels: sound argument (logos), credibility established early rather than assumed (ethos), connection to what the reader actually values (pathos). Most writing defaults to logic alone — check the other two explicitly.
• Readers remember openings and closings most. Open with the core message; close by reinforcing it or driving the call to action, never with a generic summary.
• For longer documents: summary up front, parallel structure in lists and headings, key terms repeated consistently — variation for style creates confusion, consistency aids navigation.