We often fail to prioritize the reader and as a result, waste everyone's time. We waste the reader’s time by forcing them to dig through the crap we left in our message, and we waste our own time because things aren't getting done. This goes against our main goal - get the message understood by the target audience so that something happens.

Mistakes & ideas

1. Failing to get to the point quickly

People ignore announcements, questions, and requests because writers share their entire thinking process instead of getting to the point. I used to think that “the narrative” is important, but it only clouds the main message and makes the reader’s life harder.

The three-step Minto pyramid is an extremely helpful solution:

1. Start your message with its conclusion
2. Follow up with key arguments
3. Provide detailed information at the end

The logic is beautiful, simple and resembles funnel optimisation. Since people read from top to bottom (and stop reading after a while), you hack the conversion rate of your main point by putting it at the top. Most importantly, the reader gets the essence of your message immediately and can decide for themselves whether they want to dig into the details.

2. Shifting responsibility to the reader

In other words, skipping the homework.

I asked countless questions without enough context and shared too many ambiguous opinions wasting everyone's time in the resulting long threads. Moreover, I’m sure I’ve missed out on important knowledge and interesting discussions because people didn’t bother interacting with a message that required too much effort.

The treatment isn’t easy: you need to look at your own message as if it was sent by someone else and you didn’t have the context you have now. This way, you can come up with follow-up questions and preemptively answer them in the message itself.

3. Using smart words instead of simple ones

It's hard to justify using smart (or long) words in a Slack message. Remember - the goal is getting our point across so that something happens. Logically, the more sophisticated, rare and long a word is, the fewer people will know its meaning. Therefore, the barrier to understanding our message increases, which goes against the original goal.

Now I simplify as much as possible and encourage you to do the same. Say now instead of currently, hard instead of arduous, and many instead of numerous.

4. Writing a lot instead of as little as possible

The principle that is so popular in schools and universities ruins our communication. Sadly, many still suffer from the thesis word count trauma when writing a Slack message. This makes life harder for both the writer who tries to squeeze out as much as possible and the reader who has to deal with all that text.

To avoid this mistake I read my drafts and meticulously remove the words that aren't 100% necessary one by one.

5. Tolerating bad grammar

I repeated this mistake often at the beginning of my career and fixed it thanks to timely feedback from my manager. Neglecting grammar made my writing look sloppy and untrustworthy. This mistake reminds me of the broken windows theory: bad grammar signals a general lack of professionalism.

In terms of solutions, Grammarly often annoys the hell out of me, so instead, I rely on rereading the drafts and editing sent messages. On special occasions (this post, for example) I paste the text into Editpad with Grammarly enabled.

6. Sending the first draft

The mother of all mistakes. When an important message is longer than two sentences sending the first draft without revising is unacceptable.

Obviously, you can't reread every single message - this would be a different flavor of time waste, so how do you decide? Generally, I "do what feels right", but I guess you can also rely on the audience size and the significance of consequences (what is this message supposed to trigger? what happens if this message isn't read?).

Closing remarks:

• I've made a few other less frequent mistakes such as showing a lack of confidence unnecessarily and trying to seem smarter than I am, but these errors will be avoided if the ones in the list above are dealt with.

• Sources I directly or indirectly used for this article and can highly recommend are WriteThinkLearn by Michael A. Covington (it's free!), On Writing Well by William Zinsser (first half of the book), Lenny's newsletter, and 37signals (in general, and this communication guide in particular).

• The best way to avoid all mistakes from the list is to not write the message at all. Do you really have to send it?