Write for the 30s, 2 mins, and 10 mins+ reader
The objective of business communication is to ensure your audience digests your message. Readers are likely diverse in their interest and investment with your work. So a lesson I’ve internalized: Explicitly structure your communication to support the 30 seconds, 2 minute, and 10 minute+ reader.
This means making it dead-simple to glean the top takeaways, but easy to go deeper.
For my 30 second audience: Make it easy to skim with tl;drs, bolded key messages, and visuals – but provide depth under the hood, sometimes embedded with links.
For my 2 minute audience, let’s go deeper:
Make it easy to skim.
Tl;drs — always. I’ve never met a doc that wasn’t improved with a quick summary. The trite “too long; didn’t read” label literally conveys that you’re providing a faster way to get the gist.
Bold your key messages. Use headlines / subheads to convey your key points. In a deck, make the slide heads convey the key message. In a doc, do the same with H1 / H2s and bolded text. If you skim a doc / deck with headlines like “Problem,” “Opportunity,” “Solution,” you won’t learn anything; if you skim something that embeds the messages there directly, you’ll absorb the narrative.
Use visuals. Our eyes glaze over verbose paragraphs, but diagrams and photos can be, to steal a Sheryl Sandberg phrase, "thumb stopping content." Even lists (ahem, this post) can appear more accessible than a wall of text. I usually opt for tables as ways to organize content. I even have a teammate known to convey key messages in his docs with memes, iykyk.
Provide depth under the hood.
Skimmable docs give you permission to go long. If you follow these best practices, brevity is less essential. Including depth, like actual data, wins credibility with those who take a greater interest. Be careful though: Sometimes, the sticker shock of a high page count can scare people off. In which case...
Link off for more! Aggressively link off to posts, docs, or data for those who really want to go deep on a topic. When I write upward communication, I’ll sometimes even prepare two docs — shortform, longform — so that the main artifact is succinct but interested parties can go under the hood.