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Unpopular opinion: my boss calling my emails 'word salad' did more for me than any class
I used to write these long winding updates to my team, like 6 paragraphs for a simple status report. My old boss pulled me aside in the parking lot at our Denver office and said people were skimming and missing the actual asks. She made me keep every update under 100 words with the question in the first line. I hated it for about 2 months. Then a project lead told me my notes were the only ones she read all the way through. Now I write short stuff and my coworkers actually reply. Has anyone else gotten harsh feedback that turned out to be the fix?
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the_dakota7d ago
See, this is the kind of story that sounds nice but really just teaches people to write for skimmers instead of actual readers. Cutting everything to 100 words means you drop context, nuance, and the stuff that actually matters later when someone has to make a real decision, and plenty of bad ideas sound way better when you strip them down to a snappy one liner. Your project lead read your notes because they were short, not because they were good, and that is a real difference.
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