Rough and Ready Rules for Writing

In the HSBC Architecture team, we try to live up to the three principles of Zang Jing Ge: technical skill, communication mastery and leadership power. All of these dimensions are important, but in a Technology team of over 40,000 people, distributed around the world, communication is particularly important. Although it helps to work things out by writing them down, architects are often accused of being unclear in their written communication. In order to get better at this, we have built thirty two rough and ready rules which we try to practice every time we write a document or produce a presentation. They are not formal and not perfect and many of them may seem incredibly obvious, but they seem to help us, and Id like to share them here:

1) Start with the punchline. Make it clear why this document exists, and what you are looking for from the person reading it.

2) Construct your chain of reasoning. What are your starting premises? What is your supporting data? What follows from these? What is your conclusion?

3) Know your audience. Who are you writing this for? What will their concerns be? What will their questions be?

4) Set the context. Few people will be as close to this topic as you, and your audience will need to be briefed or reminded of what it is all about.

5) Assume intelligence but also assume ignorance. Most of the time, your audience will be capable of grasping complex concepts. But they won’t be able to guess the meaning of terms they have never heard.

6) Assume absence. If your document is written well, and is about an important topic, it will be read when you are not there. Make sure that it speaks for itself.

7) Write it out. It is good to summarize, to synthesize and to use graphics to explain. But you need to have done the underlying thinking and be capable of writing it out.

8) Write in real sentences first. Use techniques such as headings and bulletproof points for visual impact, structure and orientation, but don’t let them take the place of plain, well constructed sentences.

9) Read it out. Go back and read what you have written to yourself. You will always find grammatical goofs, factual errors and obscure passages.

10) Keep language simple.

11) Keep graphics simple. You can do a lot with words, lines and boxes.

13) Assume print. Presentations will be read on paper (or in pdf form on tablets) more often than they are presented on screen. Make sure that your document prints well.

14) Quantify assertions. If you are proposing an investment project, how much will it cost? How long will it take? How many people will work on it?

15) Check your numbers. What’s the source of your numbers? Are they credible? Do you know the difference between run and change? Do you know the difference between cash and P&L?

16) Own your numbers. Wherever you got them from, they are now yours. You can’t compensate for weak numbers by blaming someone else.

17) Don’t be alarmist. Don’t make claims that the company will break if you’re ignored. If the company actually will break, then a sober, serious tone works better than panic.

18) Don’t attempt jokes. This document is part of your professional portfolio.

19) Check grammar, spelling and punctuation.

20) Care about formatting. Mismatched fonts, misaligned boxes, random italics, differences in header style, inconsistent colour palettes all snag the eye and undermine your message.

21) Learn from the best. Look critically at the documents you are presented with. If you find a method of communication particularly useful or compelling, add it to your personal library.

22) Seek advice. Get somebody else to read your document, particularly if they are unfamiliar with the subject.

23) Keep the pen and keep your voice. If you are writing the document, make sure that you keep final editorial control, and that the final voice is yours. Don’t let your message be watered down by committee.

24) Don’t bluff. If you don’t know something, say so, and say what you are going to do to find out.

25) Explicit is better than implicit. If there is a key point to your argument, say it out loud rather than assuming that people know it.

26) Expose conflict. If there is an unresolved disagreement in the middle of your proposal, expose it and say what you are going to do to resolve it.

27) Avoid the passive, corporate, bureaucratic style. Not ‘through a process of analysis, it has been deemed appropriate that we consider the adoption of X’ but ‘we chose X’.

28) Find the slogans. If written well, certain phrases will become what people remember about the document, and will stand in for the argument when you are not there. Make sure that the phrases people take are the ones you intend.

29) Find the anchor slide. In every presentation, there will be an anchor slide that people keep coming back to, because it explains things or addresses their concerns so well. If you don’t know which slide is the anchor slide, you are not done. If you do know which slide is the anchor slide, figure out which other slides you can now delete.

30) Don’t show the current state as spaghetti and the future state as simplicity. No-one has ever bought this in the history of architecture. A spaghetti slide whose deliberate purpose is to confuse and alarm is irritating if unsuccessful and confusing and alarming if successful.

31) Read it again. And rewrite it again. And again.

32) End with the punchline. Make it clear why this document exists, and what you are looking for from the person reading it.

Thirty two rules is a pretty arbitrary number. When we started this list, it was supposed to be ten, but we kept adding new ones. I bet that you have some ideas too.

(Views in this article are my own.)