Another one bites the dust – I just finished hearing “Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less” by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. One of my chief complaints about engineering training is the dismissal of communication skills – speaking, reading, and writing.
Effective communication for developers is everywhere –
- Being succinct and accurate in daily meetings
- Opening clear tickets so others can understand, reproduce, and prioritize
- Effectively communicate their work, suggestions, etc.
Here are some thoughts I had while reading the book –
- Using LLMs – chatGPT, along with other tools such as Grammarly, Wordtune, and so on, can help you tune the tone of your passage and adjust it to your audience. The book recommends asking a friend for feedback, but in 2023, we can first ask chatGPT.
- CV – the book suggests many scenarios for using smart brevity – social media, presentations, etc. I would also like to suggest writing a CV. Many CVs start with a short paragraph about the person. You can use this paragraph wisely.
- Spell out your takeaways – I understand the rationale while struggling with this advice. This is a rhetoric trick – tell your audience what is the one thing you want them to take from this talk instead of leaving it open.
- Amazon 6 pagers – the book starts with saying like “words overdose” and “words addicts”. Stating that since we moved to the web instead of print, the number of words is unlimited, and nobody reads them besides the headlines. Then, they refer to Amazon 6 pagers as a good example of a compact way of transferring a message. Six pages is a lot, and there is probably a way to reduce the length.
- Culture – I find this book very American-centric and complains that people need to be more direct. This is, of course, relative to the Israeli culture I come from. I strongly recommend reading “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer on this topic.
- Content structure – one of the repeating recommendations is to use bullet points to draw attention and help the audience focus. Additional recommendations include using bold fonts to emphasize important points, combining graphs and charts, etc. As a reader, I get this completely. As a writer who tries to distill her words, I want my words to stand out without using those tricks.
Tom Ron 