Headline Memos

Semler, who owns a engineering firm in Brazil, has a somewhat unusual management style described in the "Maverick!" book.

He has a rule about memos: they should be less than one page long, and you should be able to learn all you really need to know from the subject line - which leads to subjects modelled on tabloid (eg. Sun in the UK, something like National Enquirer in the US) newspaper headlines.

I've found it a useful rule myself. "Server upgrades before year-end to cost $65000", that sort of thing.

It has a connection to OneStartlingSentence, only for a different context.

-- PaulHudson

I try to apply this rule when writing E-mail. -- ApoorvaMuralidhara

Seconded. I've seen a lot of technical papers that read like thrillers - the hook is in the last paragraph - which means, of course, that you never get to it. The other useful trick from journalism is to construct a piece in decreasing order of importance - put the essential points up front and fill in the detail later. Imagine there's a harassed sub-editor who needs more space. He/she should be able to trim the piece from the end without losing the point. -- SteveFreeman

Sub-editors allegedly trim from the end without reading the content. -- DaveHarris