How to Write Better Emails and Documents at Work

One person’s experience, not advice

Favourl Editorial put together a list of publicly available web pages that helped them, with a note on why each one is here. Favourl hosts the list and the notes — not the pages themselves. Those belong to whoever published them, and linking to a public page is neither an endorsement of it nor any relationship with its owner.

Nobody at Favourl has checked any of it, and a page can change or disappear after it was saved. What worked for one person may not work for you — circumstances differ. Where money, health, law or safety are involved, treat this as a starting point and take proper advice.

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The sequence

In the order Favourl Editorial put them. Each step points at a public page they used; where they left a note, that is the part worth reading.

1
inc.com
The six-page memo
Narrative memos instead of slides. The argument for why is stronger than the format itself.
Source: inc.com
2
paulgraham.com
Paul Graham: Write Simply
Short. Most work writing fails for exactly the reasons listed here.
Source: paulgraham.com
3
plainenglish.co.uk
Plain English Campaign
Concrete rules you can apply to a document today.
Source: plainenglish.co.uk
4
developers.google.com
Google technical writing courses
Free, structured, with exercises. Aimed at engineers who must write.
Source: developers.google.com
5
hbr.org
Harvard Business Review
Agendas are not the fix; naming the decision and the decider is.
Source: hbr.org
6
en.wikipedia.org
Request for Comments
Where the written-proposal culture came from, and why it endures.
Source: en.wikipedia.org

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How to Write Better Emails and Documents at Work

The sequence

The six-page memo

Paul Graham: Write Simply

Plain English Campaign

Google technical writing courses

Harvard Business Review

Request for Comments

Save all 6 links in one tap

Read next

How this was published