Micro-Rant: Blah, Blah, Blah

The type of ignorance that hides in a 10,000 word report or a 100 bullet presentation can usually be exposed in 10 minutes at a whiteboard.

Some days it all reads like blah, blah, blah. Sometimes it's me. More often it's the quality of the content I'm trying to consume.

At one extreme are documents written by technical writers or <shudder> actual engineers. They tend to be filled with 50 word compound sentences that are densely packed with arcane technical terms whose definitions spawn brutal flame-wars on Slashdot. This type of document seldom includes real world business cases, or thoughtful infographics to provide higher level context.The poor business reader or IT executive is forced to ignore the cryptic terms, flee repeatedly to Wikipedia, or just bail out on the document entirely.

At the other extreme are technical documents and articles written by marketers, pundits or business writers. This content pulls off the miraculous feat of putting together hundreds or even thousands of words that add up to nothing. Instead of compounding technical terms, this kind of writing string together clichés and buzzwords that pontificate about the impact of some revolutionary, innovative, thought-leading, immersive, agile, game changing technology that's on the cutting-edge of disruptive change. I've been guilty of that kind of writing myself, because it's pretty easy to conjure the illusion of substance without doing the hard work of actually providing it. To some degree, that's what I've done here so far. So to co-opt an overused title form here's my:

Top Five Steps to Writing More Useful Content

1. Think about who you're writing for so you'll understand what type of context is required for your readers to understand what the hell you're trying to communicate.
2. Pick one key point you want to get across. Like James Carville said, "If you say three things, you don't say anything." In this post, the main point I want to convey is: Think about your reader during the entire writing process.
3. Have a voice and show some emotion, for god's sake. Business people are people. Well, most of them. Cold objectivity is boring and usually disingenuous.
4. Use concrete examples and stories to bring concepts to life. Just my earlier reference to leaving a document to look up something in Wikepedia offered a little concrete story most people could relate to.
5. Write to learn. If you think deeply about explaining a topic to another person, you're bound to think about it in new ways. When you think about a topic you already understand in a different way, you'll not only gain new insights for yourself, but be able to share a more fully realized and comprehensible story to your reader.