It is also the case that people aren't as good at writing as they think. I've seen people write pages and pages of text to say a few simple things, don't separate the important from the unimportant, etc, and then wonder why others don't take 15 minutes out of their busy day to read the incessant, flavorless text until they find the actual point.
A good way to write text where you're going to ask people for stuff is to write it in a top-down manner, where first of all you mention "I want X", then you quickly summarize what exactly you want and why, and then write a more detailed paragraph on the various nuances, always making sure to cut everything down to its absolute essentials.
I really like that style. It's related to the Inverted Pyramid style in journalism, meaning others have thought a lot about how to get important information up to the front of a piece of writing.
I learned about this in journalism class in high school over 20 years ago and it's still one of the most valuable lessons I remember from high school. As someone with ADHD, I really appreciate when people follow this style.
Blog articles, especially medium, are really bad about this. I've clicked on headlines about an interesting topic only to find the article no even mention the topic from the headline until 2/3 of the way into the article.
> I've seen people write pages and pages of text to say a few simple things
Heh...reminds me of a couple anecdotes from my days in school.
Sometimes as we were being handed back tests/quizzes that had some questions that required a couple sentences to answer, there'd be times where I did exactly that. I wrote only a couple sentences. Meanwhile, I glance at the person next to me to discover that they had wrote two entire paragraphs. I got marked as having a correct answer with only two sentences, so what the hell were they writing about?
Then I had a teacher who, before the final exam, said that every question is able to be answered in four sentences or less. If you write several paragraphs, you would lose points for wasting his time, even if your answer was correct.
A good way to write text where you're going to ask people for stuff is to write it in a top-down manner, where first of all you mention "I want X", then you quickly summarize what exactly you want and why, and then write a more detailed paragraph on the various nuances, always making sure to cut everything down to its absolute essentials.
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