I see a lot of poorly written and badly designed information in the course of my travels. I suppose that sounds a bit harsh, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s not so much that they are badly written, they are just sloppily put together.
For example, the other day someone gave me a big long memo about a meeting they had been to. It was kind of them to take the trouble to make some notes, but they had really just poured out their thoughts onto a page without any consideration of which order the content should be presented in so that it made logical sense to the reader. This resulted in some of the key points about why we should go down a particular path being in mixed in with very detailed points about how this should happen (process notes). They had gone to the trouble of typing up their notes but they hadn’t taken that one extra step of organising them so that they made sense. Just a few extra minutes would have made the whole thing make more sense and have been more persuasive as well.
This is often the case with emails as well. People just write down whatever pops into their minds without thinking about what the reader needs to know first. I don’t think this is intentional but it would certainly help if writers did a little editing. By all means write down whatever comes to mind, but feel free to move it around so that it makes sense. Put it in a logical order. Your readers will thank you.
Margaret Moon 