One of the important things that I remember them drilling into our heads in business school was about how to write a business memo. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. Emails, decks, and recommendations are ubiquitous in business.

I remember three main points.

One, use clear and concise writing. If you can use fewer words, do that. Two, be decisive. In fact, they used to tell us that being decisively wrong was always better than being vaguely correct. And three, be as quantitative as possible.

If you can replace words with numbers, you should do that. For example, instead of saying that something recently increased significantly, it is far more effective to say that something increased by 27% over the last 18 days.

I was reminded of this earlier today when I came across this:

Supposedly, it is what Amazon used to tell its employees back in 2018. I don't know the source, but the tips sound right and make sense. Be concise. Use data. Eliminate weasel words. And make sure you're communicating a "what". In other words, be decisive.