Writing for Busy People

I saw this great article on Writing for Busy People by Ben Googer .  Here are the highlights:

Well, I can tell you that’s sage advice. It’s great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it’s even better when they’re written for busy people. Here are some examples:

  • Making important points up front
  • Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
  • Writing clearly and succinctly
  • No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
  • Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
  • Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

These days, I find I don’t have a lot of time to read everything carefully, so the better structured a document is, the more I get out of it. I frequently find I miss entire subsections or points of documents, even when there’s relatively little text, because of incomplete organization. My eyes definitely glaze over when i see a large block of unbroken text with few headings. At the very least, it’d be very helpful if folk would structure their thoughts into: "Problem" and "Proposed Solution".

Before you post, stop and think if you’ve written something in a way that’ll allow others to get the most out of it. Communicating your ideas effectively means you may get a clearer and quicker response from other people.

Leave a Reply