communicating-in-writinglisted

# Communicating in Writing Advisory and high-freedom: the layers below are thinking tools, not a sequence to execute. Work through intent, audience, and structure before drafting prose; craft comes last. Structure determines comprehension more than prose quality does — fix structure before fixing sentences. ## Layer 1 — Intent Establish before writing a word: - **Purpose** — what the document must achieve, in one sentence. If there are multiple outcomes, rank them; a document with two equal purposes usually fails both. - **What changes** — what the reader should know, believe, feel, or do after reading that they did not before. If you cannot state this, the writing is not ready to begin. - **Call to action** — what you are asking the reader to do. Even informational documents have an implicit next step; surface it. - **Audience, document type, constraints** — who reads it, what form it takes, what is non-negotiable. Resolve all of these before drafting. A document begun without a clear purpose cannot be edited into shape — it needs rewriting once purpose is found. ## Layer 2 — Audience - Identify the primary reader (the decision-maker) and any secondary readers. For each: what do they know, what do they care about, what will they resist? - Working memory holds roughly four new chunks at once. One idea per paragraph, lists of seven or fewer items, complex arguments broken into discrete steps. - Prior knowledge determines structure, not just vocabulary. Experts tolerate