Using brevity to write better
A document-based culture is only as good as its documents. Here are a few tips to improve your docs.
All posts tagged: writing
Categories for journaling
Over the past few years, long-hand journaling helped me reflect and think through many personal and professional topics. Ofir Sharony offers a nice framework to establish a journaling routine. “Start by shutting down all interruptions: disable Slack mentions and email notifications, place your phone out of sight, and enter your flow by wearing your noise-canceling headset. Once you feel focused, go over today’s calendar, skim through your to-do list, and reflect [on one or more […]
There is something in the air
Hot take: Blogs will have a revival moment drafting in the momentum and confusion of the web3 discussion.
Less is more … difficult – writing summaries
Writing is hard and writing a summary is no exception. If you are working on proposals, general research or strategies, at some point you have to summarize your idea. As Pascal once said “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” A summary takes time to get right. The investment does pay off as it makes your work easier to digest, improves structure and highlights your […]
How to get more out of OneNote
OneNote is one of those underappreciated apps within Office 365. To be honest, I’ve only used it for the last two years despite my wife having praised it for her work as a teacher for a long time. But it really has grown on me and I enjoy taking notes, working on outlines and reviewing documents with OneNote. Its integration with Teams makes it a no-brainer to share notes among a project team. I recently […]
Writing well, often
I very much believe in the power of good writing. As such I admire the good work of companies like Mailchimp and Slack to promote good writing that is more approachable. Hence I was delighted when Anna Pickard started publishing some of Slack’s content style guide and writing principles. They follow Mailchimp’s great work, who published their voice and tone style guide already last year. At work me and my team started writing a monthly newsletter. It […]
On writing – Where Creativity, Fear and Action go on a road trip
Any creative endeavour is an adventure. It takes us from here to somewhere new, hopefully somewhere exciting. That sounds simple and exciting in itself, but the devil is in the detail and once we embark on our adventure, we notice that things turn out to be trickier than previously imagined. Let’s take writing as an example. Everyone knows the situation: we’ve got a wonderful idea, something to say and we want to share that idea. So we sit down and start with a […]
Writing good copy
I write a monthly newsletter at work. Our team is distributed across three continents and too many timezones. From time to time things slip through the cracks and you hear the inevitable “I wish I had known that earlier”. The newsletter tries to close the space between the cracks and helps people know what’s going on. It is also a welcome place to highlight the great work that people contribute to the team. I very much enjoy writing […]
Bad writing is a meeting factory
From Guilded, a Seattle web design & engineering firm, comes a nugget around why good writing is so important: Bad writing is a meeting factory. Being able to articulate a thought in writing means your team gets to take advantage of asynchronous communication. Whereas meetings are synchronous— requiring all parties to be present and engaged for the duration of the communication event—written communication is asynchronous, meaning the recipient can address your request or idea on their […]