How to write a good business document

Abstract

Purpose of a document is to teleport the reader to the intended destination. Writing a business document in the form of a story with a series of answers that seed further questions, laid out on a tree structure, is a great way to achieve this.

Here we talk about what constitutes a story and the tree structure, and walk through the process of writing your ideas in that form.

Introduction

In an effort to improve my writing, I picked up a few books and other teachings on the topic from good writers. This is largely a distillation of that adapted to the business setting with some practice. First, why should we write well?

I have yet to meet a person that finds the act of writing business documents rewarding. I am certainly not one. I understand that despite my inclinations, writing good documents is critical to broadly sharing my thoughts and ideas. I cannot be everywhere all at once to personally convey them to people. Even if I were, I would still need to fully form my ideas in a structured way for communication, which is half the work towards writing them well. Consider a poorly written document — every reader must make sense of the arguments, discover your ideas, and internalize them. This places an enormous burden on your reader. No doubt most readers are capable of this, but many will not be willing to do so due to the mental and temporal toll it extracts. Writing a good document shifts this burden to you. You must structure and clearly articulate the ideas for ready consumption. However, this is also valuable to you since making the document interesting means more people will read it, and making it clearly comprehensible means you will more often achieve your goals from the document. Here we deal with methods and strategies of making a business document clear and interesting.

Writing a business document in the form of a story with a series of answers that seed further questions, laid out on a tree structure, is a great way to transport the reader to your intended destination.

The Content

Make sure you transport the reader somewhere in your document. If the reader learns nothing and goes nowhere, your document is a waste of time and should not be written. You must have a clear idea of where the reader must be at the end of the document. It also helps to clearly establish where they are at the beginning. Since this is a business document, you should state the destination as early as possible. The content of your document is a path from the beginning to the (already communicated) destination, laid out in the form of a story.

A story is a sequence of information where each element answers a curious question in the reader’s mind, while seeding another question to be answered by the next element. In this sense, you will create and sustain suspense in the mind of the reader despite having given away the ending right at the beginning. Suspense is just a curious question in one’s mind regarding possible outcomes.

You should strive to keep the document as short as possible. People often find validation for the amount of work they have put into something by heaving all of their insecurities on paper in the form of excruciating details — either the details of the content matter, or the details of how much research went into something. Your goal should be singular, to transport the reader to your desired destination, and your content should serve no purpose other than that. Imagine that you must pay for each word that you write, since you actually do, with the time of your readers and the risk that they will abandon your document. Moreover, each wasted word takes attention away from the central point of your document and dilutes it.

Each document should present a single idea to the reader. If you try to take the reader to too many places all at once, you will fail. If you feel compelled to have more than one idea in a document, ask yourself what is the underlying thread that binds them. Identify the single idea at a higher level of abstraction, and make that the central point of your document.

Use data to highlight your idea and make sure to connect the data to the reader. Data is the most powerful tool for changing opinions. However, unconnected data is uninteresting. For example, most people are only mildly interested in the average wage information of other people (if you are, it is easily searchable at the bureau of labor statistics website). Though if you were offered the same information for people connected to you (say people you graduated high school with), you will likely be much more interested.

Use Visualizations. People are much more likely to remember a good picture than a thousand words. Visualizations are time consuming to create. Since your document contains only a single idea, you should not need many.

The Structure

Here we talk about how to establish the beginning, reveal the destination, and craft a story with a sequence of answers that raise new questions, to land the reader at your destination.

An introduction should start with yourself and the reader on the same page by providing a setting with statements that the reader can agree with and/or knows to be true. This is the setting in which you will set your story. This is important since it sets a common context from where you start your journey. Here, you must not present arguments or facts to the reader that they will find hard to agree with. Know your audience and connect with them as much as you can.

Next, you present your larger question that your document must answer. This can be done in two ways — by either introducing a challenge or a complication in the setting that elicits a question in the mind of the reader. Or by simply presenting the question. I generally prefer the former wherever possible — since this makes it the reader’s question in their mind. They are going to be ever more enthusiastic about finding out the answer to their own question.

Now is the time to present your ideas. Do not present your ideas in the order in which you think, but in the order in which the reader will best understand them. Things often appear obvious (or at least easier) in retrospect. Use this fact when writing your document, and present your facts as a retrospective to the broader point you are making — presenting the point first. This considerably reduces the mental load of trying to understand the arguments leading up to the point. As such, this is the time to present the central idea of your document.

Organize the ideas in a tree structure — with the central idea of your document at the top. A tree structure is logical for consumption of ideas (Barbara Minto calls this a pyramid — as a data scientist I simply could not get myself to call a tree anything but). The highest node of the tree should contain the central idea of your document. The next level nodes of the tree should all answer a question supporting the idea, and possibly raise additional questions that will be answered by the child nodes. Make sure that the nodes at a certain level are at the same level of logical abstraction. Also make sure they are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) in the question they answer, wherever applicable.

Here’s what the structure should look like (with an example tree of this very document):

Sometimes you may need an abstract — normally when you expect the reader to want to evaluate quickly if they must invest in reading your document. This often happens if you are writing on a familiar topic where a lot of other literature is available. An abstract describes how your document deals with the topic and allows the reader to make a determination if they’ll find the read worthwhile. It can also serve as a useful summary in emails.

As another example of the above structure, consider a document trying to make an argument for diversification of an online advertising business:

The Writing Process

Mostly, I get stuck when writing something because:

1. I have all these ideas floating around in my head, and I can’t figure out what goes where
2. I know the idea I want to present, but I don’t have the right words for it

Write the first thing you know. Then write the next thing you know. Ignore structure, flow, and polish. A good way to do this is start writing a paragraph for every idea that comes to your mind without worrying about the language. Get the stream of your consciousness out on the paper. If you get stuck with an idea, drop the paragraph midway through the sentence, press the enter key, and start a new paragraph with another idea in your mind. Don’t worry that the next idea should come before, or after this one, or if there is something that needs to be between them, or that you need transition text. Don’t worry about the quality of your writing, or the fact that you may be repeating yourself over and over. You will have the time to fix it later. The worst thing you can do is wait there, staring at the screen, waiting for the perfect words to come out in the perfect order. And if you spend long enough sitting there, maybe they will. But it may take more time than you have at hand.

Once you have done this, you will have several pages of rambling ideas (the one for this document was fifteen odd pages long featuring a two-page discussion on when to write an abstract). This is when you start to move paragraphs around and group the ideas. Group similar ideas together and let the structure emerge. Think about the tree structure and start to enforce on your groupings the structure — start by ensuring that ideas grouped together are at the same level of abstraction, and that they are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive if that applies to your ideas. If an idea appears to be out of structure, Identify the parent or the child of your idea and write a paragraph on that. At the same time, you will realize that the tree is incomplete with missing nodes — fill in the gaps. Do not be too attached to your content and do not be afraid to cut out ideas, sentences, paragraphs or entire sections that do not fit and/or serve the purpose.

This is the time to make sure you have a good idea of your destination for the reader, and a beginning whence from you must teleport the reader to this destination. Your draft will be imperfect — you will make another pass at it, and then another and so on. The goal here is to get the structure described above right, as concisely as possible. How many times you should go over it is a matter of how polished you want your document to be and the time at hand. Though one thing is certain, this process will take a lot less time than trying to come up with a perfect draft right out of the bat.

I employ two techniques in particular when writing. First, I start to draw out the tree structure on a piece of paper to help guide me. Second, when I feel good about the structure, I sit down and try to get into the mind of the reader and read the document from that perspective. The process goes something like this:

Imagine you are the reader and are completely out of context when opening the document for the first time. What will the first few lines feel like when you read them? As you read each line you ask yourself: Would they make sense to you given the context you have at the time learned from the document so far? Would they be clear enough for you to internalize the idea and form a question in your mind about “what, why, or how”? Would they be interesting enough? This is a very enlightening exercise, especially if I know my audience. Professional writers often suggest putting your draft aside and reading it months later for a fresh perspective — this is the business equivalent of that when you don’t have enough time.

Happy writing!

This work derives heavily on lessons on writing from Malcolm Gladwell, Barbara Minto, ANNE LAMOTT, Neil Gaiman, Judy Blume, James Patterson and others.