The secret to succinctness

What are the secrets to succinctness in your writing?

Succinctness is defined as the quality of being expressed clearly and without unnecessary words

One of the things that set great writers apart is their ability to make the complex easy to read and easy to understand. Sounds simple, but in reality, it is anything but. At Amazon, there is a page limit for documents.

Six pages.

That’s it. Six pages to communicate the big ideas to launch Alexa, Prime Now, and AWS. Just six pages to communicate the plans for these multi-billion dollar businesses, (and no, before you ask, you can’t have font size 2!)

The answer is succinctness. Every team usually writes a roadmap for their feature, product, or business area. These get rolled up again and again, and combined into documents for larger teams, and organisations. Each time they get consolidated, the documents are re-written to focus on larger goals and ambitions. They focus on delivering wider value for customers, and they look to create much larger value streams for the business. They also contain less detail.

Detail is important, but finding the right level of detail is key. As documents work their way up the management layers, the level of detail required changes. I have seen my 6-page regional enablement strategy be consolidated into a paragraph at my team level, and a sentence at the organisational level. My immediate leadership needed to know about the customer base, engagement levels, and the plan for the next 12 months. Their leadership needed to know less, and their leadership even less again.

One thing that is consistent is that the document is designed to force decision making.

Next time you are writing and editing your document, ask yourself, is this too much detail? When I am reviewing documents for others, they are usually about their stories. Often they dive into the details. They tell their reader the classification of storage, and the protocols set up to call it. Now, these details may be important to your reader, but if they detract from the overarching story you are trying to tell, it’s too much. Finding the right level of detail is a skill. It needs practice. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right on the first pass, you can always edit and improve for the next draft.