Engineers get a bad wrap for our writing. Technical writing they call it. So let’s all be honest now – the bad wrap we get is legit. Engineers suck at getting a message across simply and efficiently.
For all of our focus on getting to good solutions and making processes more efficient, we have a hard time explaining it. Too many of us believe that you need to use a lot of words to explain complex solutions. I’ve seen (and created) many a sales deck or client facing solution presentation that is overly dense, complicated and just plain says too much. Explaining ourselves should focus on making complex solutions simple – not discussing the problems at the same level of detail that we worked with.
Marketers discovered this fact years ago. Go through and pick your favorite sales decks of the past five years. I’ll bet they have closer to 20 words per page on average (even if you are an engineer) than 50 or more. Describing how something works, it turns out, is more effective through fewer words than more. It allows the reader to fill in the gaps with their own experience and needs instead of being presented a checklist or detailed manifest complete with 3 levels of exceptions.
My challenge to my fellow engineers – cut, cut, cut! Use no more than 2 sentences on a page. Take your favorite presentations and rewrite them to be simpler – even if they are simple already. Words, it turns out, are the enemy. Avoid them in mass.