Writing to inform

We’re talking right now about the number one most critical skill that can drive your career success and impact: writing. If you are going to write effectively you’ve got to know why you are writing, and we identified 3 modes of written technical communication. We’ve covered the first, and second, so let’s look at the third…

Passing on information

Much of your writing, at least early in your career, will likely be writing to inform.

When you are writing to inform, you are creating a document that provides a status or progress report, a new perspective, or an opinion for your audience. For example, project progress reports are information products.

Different forms of writing have different expected lifetimes

I’ve separated this from writing to disseminate (or educate) mostly because of the different time scales that the written products have. When you write to disseminate, your document is valuable as long as the technology you are describing is relevant; sometimes this is years or decades.

When you are writing to inform, your document is only relevant until the information you have presented is consumed. For example, a progress report is only valuable until you produce the next progress report, and it is most valuable right after it’s written because at that time the state of the project is most closely reflected in the report.

The same is true when you are describing the options available for solving a particular problem or the rationale for a specific design decision. Once a choice is made or a design decision approved, the value of the document is reduced (other than as a historical record of how a project progressed over time).

The form can be less formal

Writing to inform is typically less formal than writing to educate or persuade.

You tend to inform those in your immediate sphere of influence: your supervisor or another design group in your company working on a different aspect of a project. These documents tend to be internal, working-level documents. Often they exist only in e-mail form, and may be read only once and discarded.

But accuracy and style still matter!

Remember, however, that while this form of writing may be less formal, the need for accuracy and style is not reduced. These documents reflect your thought processes in making a decision or represent the progress of your group; they are reflections of you and your team. Even though they are less formal than other forms of writing, they too need to be written thoughtfully and executed carefully.

And it is not a given that all documents that inform will be less structured and formal than other kinds of documents. Your company may have a very detailed, formal structure for progress reports that make them highly polished and lengthy. As with all documents you produce for your company or organization, it is important to understand and conform to the expectations of your particular organization.