Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) offers eight tips for fiction writers in his introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (2000), but three of them, tips 1, 5, and 8, apply to business and technical writers as well.
Tip 1: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. We need to heed this advice when writing anything at work, from an audit or an investigation report to a procedure or a proposal. Readers do not need to know all the who, what, where, when, why, and how—only as needed. Consider the business purpose related to your audience. It's not what you know that matters; it's what your readers need to know.
Tip 5: Start as close as to the end as possible. Fiction writers can take this tip to mean that they should reveal or foreshadow the climax or even the resolution early in the story. On-the-job writers use another term: executive summary. Ask for what you want right up front. In an incident report, you will want to note the human and property damage of an accident immediately. For a proposal, you want to put the ask right away.
Tip 8: Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such a complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should the cockroaches eat the last few pages. Well, Vonnegut said it all with this piece of guidance, didn't he? Place the request before the reason, the solution before the problem, and the result before the process.
Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut.
