When you move a movie, (most of the time) the person watching should not realize there are a camera and crew filming the action. The camera is a necessary part of the process but it should be invisible. If the audience senses the camera, it could remove them from the story being told. It will suspend their sense of belief.
Communicating information is the same way. It is not enough to simplify put the facts and figures onto a page in order. They must be constructed in order to build a narrative and lead to a conclusion. The best-written communication is one in which the reader has a question pop into their head that is immediately answered on the next line or next slide. Not only have you led them toward the question, but you have anticipated it and given them the answer. This is communicating but keeping the camera out of view.
Bad communications cause a reader to ask questions that are never answered or are answered in a way that leads to other unanswered questions. A communication is a narrative. From the first word, it should lead down a path. There should not be unnecessary information that muddies the water. There should not be rhetoric that does not match the rest of the tone. There should not be whole sections that do not support the drive to the conclusion.
No first draft ever gets it right. The best writer in the world cannot put on the page exactly what they have pictured in their head. Ideas do not work like that. The mental view of an idea changes when brought into the world. Words that describe the idea abstractly do not work when put to page. Yet most people still hit the send button after draft 1 is completed.
My rule of thumb is that a well done PowerPoint slide takes about 25 hours of total input to get right. If you have a 10-page presentation, you need to plan for 250 hours of work to get it from idea to ready. For one person working alone at 40 hours a week, that means they have a little over 6 weeks of work to get it into shape. Rarely are we starting from a place of no input, most things start from a template or are pulled from existing materials of which the original development time counts.
For formal written documents, there should never be fewer than three drafts with at least three reviewers. Any standard less than that leaves too much risk of the words on the page missing the message you are trying to send.
There’s a reason I (and so many others) say communication is hard. It’s extremely easy to get wrong and very hard to get right. Yet many think they do it well simply because they hit the send button.