[D13Fd]

This is a great article with nice examples, and I like the "high resolution" vs. "low resolution" concept.

But it leaves off the other side of the equation: know your audience.

If your audience wants to read a long, detailed communication, then that's great and you should write a "high resolution" message.

If your audience has little time available and no real need to know the details, then the "low resolution" message is much more effective.

The real trick is learning how to pack exactly what the reader needs to know into a "low resolution" message.

[phinullfermata]

Someone who doesn't care about the detail can and will stop reading. It's important to get your main point across early because of this fact. The inclusion of detail is helpful but it needs to be in the right place. I think this is why traditional business writing evolved to have an order like summary, recommendation, then supporting evidence.

If you've written things well you can get the best of both worlds. I noticed this in the author's review example. The first paragraph gets a reasonably high resolution description of the problem, then the detail follows in the next paragraphs.

[D13Fd]

I still disagree. Sure, you can get your main point across and then offer extra detail. But the extra detail is often detrimental in that your reader probably isn’t comfortable stopping before they read it.

To be clear, I’m talking about business communications here (as was the article), not other kinds of writing.

In my field, at least, this is a fundamental concept that differentiates some of the best communicators.

[mfuzzey]

I think it's far better give the reader as much information as reasonable and let him decicde how much he wants / needs to read. That can avoid multiple round trips and makes sure the whole picture is available to anyone who may need it.

Particularly as often the same message will be sent to multiple recieients that have different needs.

Of course you should try to structure the message so that people don't necessarilly have to read all of it.

For instance I recently sent a message about an analysis of the feasibility of changing a piece of hardware to a group that contained

* Managers * Hardware developers (in charge of implementing the hardware modification) * Software developers (in charge of adapting the software to the new hardware)

So it started with a brief summary of the idea and conclusion "yes it will work" (for the managers).

Continued with a some comments, questions addressed to the hardware team "the aproach is fine but we still need to sort out X,Y,Z"

And finished with a detailed description for the software team of how we should integrate the new hardware whilst remaining compatible with the existing.

[squeaky-clean]

Basically the idea of inverted pyramid from journalism. Start with the necessary but minimal amount information up front. Then expand the details in subsequent sentences, the further in you get the more specific and granular you get. If someone feels they've gotten all the information they need they should be able to stop reading at that point.