[DannyBee]

"I often write "too much" and struggle to really condense my thoughts into a sharpened essay. Most of my posts are 2000+ words...nowadays I'm trying to restrict myself to 1000 words. The limit forces me to really think about the core idea I want to share."

I clerked for a judge who helped us become really good writers. I know this is shocking to some, but some judges actually really do care and don't try to write thousands of pages. He really cared about trying to write opinions everyone could read and understand.

We would all get together as clerks, read the draft we had written out loud to the judge and the other clerks, and remove excess words, rewrite sentences that were too complicated, you name it. For every sentence, he encouraged us to think about who the audience really was and what we want the reader to take away from it.

If you want to make your writing shorter, this is a good approach whether you read it out loud or not. Lots of engineers write very long things because they are unsure who the audience is, or they don't think about how each sentence helps them convey something to that audience. Or they are trying to guess what questions they will get asked. Pick an audience. Go through every sentence. Remove the ones that don't actually help you convey something to your audience. Be ruthless to yourself. It's better to answer questions people have later than try to guess what they will ask you and answer it in the piece.

If you are trying to be persuasive, i'd double down on making it short, and add "order your writing and arguments in order of strength", and then "remove all the weak arguments". People won't read all the way through most of the time, and either it's convincing or it isn't. If your strongest arguments don't convince someone, your weak ones will probably make people feel like you are grasping at straws, and make the whole thing less convincing overall.

[card_zero]

> It's better to answer questions people have later than try to guess what they will ask you and answer it in the piece.

Kind of. Sometimes you can see quibbles coming a mile away and want to head them off at the pass. Without guessing questions in advance, you create a duty for yourself to interact and answer them later, and maybe you don't wanna. Besides, the whole piece is providing answers to questions guessed in advance. That's why you'd put any writing out there. So it's right to do some guessing.

The problem is guessing badly.

[faster]

The best business writing advice I ever got was "always answer more questions than you raise". It's usually clear when something is going to raise questions. I'm with you wrt guessing what questions readers will have, but reading critically can identify where you have unsupported claims, incomplete explanations, and confusing or conflicting statements.

[dan-bailey]

The "reading out loud" method is something I do, too -- learned it while getting my B.A. in Creative Writing -- it's great for helping you understand when a sentence is awkward or too wordy, or when the rhythm of a longer piece of writing is off. Writing is just speech with the benefit of an extra filter. Use the filter.

[wjnc]

Great advice. This works in companies as well! What is the goal of your writing and who is the target audience? Memos (they still exist) can be drastically different for different audiences. Mess this up and you end up on the wrong end of the stick.

A detailed memo is not meant for (most) senior management. They will all individually find a hook to hang up their coat of the week and you will go home a thousand questions, but without the decision you need. Give a senior management memo to technical staff and they will cry for months because you lack the technical skills to understand the problems they face. Give a sales memo to technical people, or the reverse and it will probably be flat out ignored. The key is differentiation. Differentiation is only possible if you practise writing the smallest set of convincing arguments in each memo you deliver.