Writing for others

Over recent years, especially in business and technical fields, the conditions under which we write and read have been changed by language models and the simplified experiences of AI.

The assumption (my assumption) is that this change often diminishes us. The scale of digital communication, the facile production of seemlingly endless "content" surely works against the patient attentiveness that we used to associate with good writing and good reading. The temptation toward superficiality is enormous, reducing language to mere information transfer.

TL:DS

I may be contributing to this problem.

Over 1200 people susbcribe to my TL:DS newsletter on LinkedIn. The title plays on Too Long; Didn't Read: that internet dismissal that introduces hasty summaries of longer texts.

My newsletter, Too Long; Donald Summarizes, began as personal note-taking. I save articles and papers to Bear Notes with bullet-point summaries at the top for easier retrieval.

Now I have started sharing compilations of these summaries as TL:DS, with links to the original articles and papers, and some very brief observations by me on why I think the piece was worth sharing, so that people would look them up and read them through.

Recently I have had some messages thanking me for the summaries, because "they saved me reading the full text." Not my intention at all!

It's not all my fault. It’s easy to assume we only need to read a summary because the internet is awash with tedious AI-generated content.

I ignore it. If someone sends me, or shares, AI text for comment, I very rarely bother to engage with it. After all, they could just as easily ask an AI for feedback. They don't need me, espcially if they have become what Muriel Spark memorably called a pisseur de copie.

I know I churn out images as others churn out text.

To be fair, people who are "generating content" are not necessarily lazy or insincere. They may have a lot to say about management, or personal improvement, or their new products; perhaps they don't feel they have the time to put into writing. Instead, they often view their prompting effort as creative input, the output as their insight delivered as text.

For all that, I tend to pass over their writing, though not without sympathy.

Yet, I do meet a lot of people who want to write well, to make their business or technical writing more worthwhile. I recently ran a workshop on this topic for a business school. Someone there liked my writing and asked if I could distill some thoughts on good writing for people on their course. Here are the basics ...

Some principles for good business writing

• Read.

  • Read for joy and for information. But, as a writer, also read to learn technique. How did they do that?

• Good writing is purposeful and respects the reader.

  • Write with definite intent while anticipating readers' needs, valuing their time and attention.

• Consider the impact of your writing.

  • Write responsibly, aware of how your words influence the reader’s understanding and actions.

• Be clear and accessible.

  • Use straightforward language to make complex ideas understandable without sacrificing accuracy or depth.

• Balance focus with openness.

  • Even when looking for clarity, don’t gloss over real ambiguities or disagreements. The world is complex. Create space for curiosity, exploration, and unexpected connections.

• Be fair.

  • Acknowledge counter-arguments, bringing to opposing ideas the openess and sincerity of engagement you would want for your own work.

• Pay attention to structure.

  • A well-structured flow organizes ideas so readers intuitively grasp their relationships and can follow your reasoning.

Writing as an encouter

These seven ideas are simple enough. In literature, I would say that good writing is a form of love; functional and commercial writing is still, at least, a form of care that takes responsibility and creates space for new thoughts to emerge. Not easy, but necessary.

When I speak of respecting the reader's time, I don't reduce them to consumers. I want us to recognize that in writing, we address people with their own pressures, hopes, pleasures and depths of understanding. This respect doesn't seek to manage or manipulate but to offer something genuinely valuable.

Personally, I struggle most with clarity and accessibility. Some things we want to say are inherently difficult, strange or resistant. There's a difference, however, between difficulty that serves the expression of complex ideas and difficulty that serves the ego.

Structure provides a container within which ambiguity and difficulty can be explored without becoming mere confusion.

If we think that readers have indeed lost habits of deep attention, perhaps we can write in ways that gently create within the text itself the time and space for genuine encounters with our subject's scope.

Reading, after all, is always a coming together of views, where the readers present understanding meets the horizon of the text.

Fairness

A reader, then, always brings their own views; but writers should also be aware that if you have something interesting to say, it is often because it contrasts with some other idea that you are challenging. When I suggest we pay attention to counter-arguments, aren't we risking a kind of false equivalence? Surely, especially in political writings, or opinionated writing, we must take sides?

Fairness in interpretation requires something different from plain neutrality. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called this hermeneutical charity: the willingness to seek the strongest possible version of a position before critiquing it. Daniel Dennett, more familiar to tech audiences, called this the Steel Man (opposite of Straw Man): attempt to express your target's position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, 'I wish I thought of putting it that way.' Perhaps the language of targets is less charitable, but its a similar idea.

This attention to others' positions, doesn't relativize truth, but it does require us to acknowledge the partial nature of our own perspective.

There's a danger even in this, if our apparent "fairness" becomes a form of strategic positioning: a posture. We often acknowledge opposing views not out of genuine respect but to demonstrate our own sophistication.

Better to remind ourselves that we may be wrong. The writer who respects the reader, also respects the reader's freedom to reject, to misunderstand, to remain unmoved.