Never keep a document’s reader guessing

A client contacted us recently while still recovering from a mild trauma.

He was the head of risk at an investment bank and had just finished reading a report on a major incident in the lending team.

The report had rightly flagged the problem in the first two sentences, grabbing his attention in an instant. And as he sweated his way through the rest of a detailed six-page account of the critical error, he’d had to suppress a feeling of rising panic.

It was only at the end that it disclosed that the problem had already been fixed. There was nothing to worry about after all.

Tell them now

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in any document is to keep the reader guessing. If they need to know something now, then tell them now.

Or, at least, tell them as soon as they start reading.

It’s tempting to start with the background and gradually bring the reader up to the present time. Then you finish with a flourish by finally revealing your conclusion and recommendations.

It’s similar to the ‘introduction, method, results, conclusion’ approach you may have been taught at school or college. But your work colleagues are unlikely to thank you for using it.

Whodunit

The trouble is, it makes your documents read like you’ve laid a trail of tantalising clues, testing the ingenuity of the audience and challenging them to deduce whodunit.

This can work brilliantly for crime fiction (although even top TV script writers often start with the action). But it has no place in most professional reports, for two reasons.

First, most people won’t stick around until the end.

We’re all busy. It’s a rare day indeed when we get to cross everything off our to-do list. (Often, it’s longer at the end than it was when we started.) So the brain prioritises what seems important in the present moment.

Readers may start a report with every intention of finishing it. But they’ll soon become distracted by all the other things on their plate unless you give them a good reason to continue.

We all read until we can stop reading, then we do.

Limited patience

The second reason is just as important. In our ever-busy digital world, patience is in short supply.

Most people – especially senior decision-makers – want the key takeaways immediately. They want to be able to choose to read on for more detail, not be forced to wade through it to get to what they really want to know.

As I explained recently, the readers of documents generally have to rely more on their working memory than the people who write them. And that working memory can hold a lot less than most of us realise.

Get to the point

So the last thing you want to do is to stuff their head so full of background that their brain gets overloaded before you’ve even got to the point.

You’re not Poirot, stringing along a rapt audience with a trail of clues before you announce ‘J’accuse!’ to everyone else’s gasps.

They want to know now. So tell them.

Use this formula

Never assume when you write a document that your reader will get to the end. In fact, it’s probably best to assume that they won’t.

So it’s crucial that you can get in your most relevant points while you still have their attention.

One way is with the WHAT formula that reporters use in their news stories. This means structuring your information in this order:

What has happened (or will happen)
How it’s happened (or will happen)
Amplify
Tie up the loose ends.

News first, background second

This lets busy readers keep up to date with developments even if they only read the first paragraph or even sentence.

And those who want to know more can read more.

Adapting this technique for work documents (or even emails) can transform how we share information in our organisations.

It’s usually a better way to write for busy people and it enables you to cater for the wide-ranging needs of a broad readership. My colleague Catie Holdridge explains more in this article.

But whatever you do, never keep readers guessing. Most of them won’t stick around for the big reveal. And those who do may not thank you for keeping them in suspense.

Image credit: Unsplash+ / Getty Images

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Author: Rob Ashton

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Rob Ashton is the founder of Emphasis and posts mainly about writing and the brain – a topic he's been researching for seven years. You can read more of his work in Writing Matters – our weekly bulletin of career-building writing advice backed by science.