11 August 2025

As a software developer in 2025, it is difficult to choose how to spend one's time. New programming languages (Rust, Zig, AssemblyScript, ...), new data storage implementations (NoSQL, NewSQL, multimodel databases, ...), and of course the alluring temptation of "artificial intelligence", all beckon for the developer's time and attention. More importantly, in a world where ChatGPT can toss off an essay on any topic imaginable without requiring any work on your part, why would any intelligent software developer spend a moment's effort on writing prose?

It's a reasonable question, and one that misses three-quarters of the point of writing. Yes, writing is used to communicate, which is in of itself a valuable outcome. Without communication, humans lose their primary advantage over all the other creatures on the planet. Communication is what allows us to erect buildings, advance science, and/or rally to a cause, among other pursuits. Much of written communication comes through informal media, like Slack messages, SMS, or email, and is often used to inform others of temporal items of interest--status messages, PR notifications, and the classic standup what-I-did-yesterday-what-I-will-do-today-any-blockers three-parter. And these are both important and impossible for ChatGPT to provide ¹.

As alluded in the previous paragraph, however, writing serves multiple purposes beyond the simpler act of pulling words out of one head into a form that others can consume. Writing serves multiple purposes to the technical professional. The more senior the professional, the more important the ability to write becomes, both on the job and in pursuit of the career. Across literally every company and organization, in every job role and seniority category, no single skill better returns on investment that that of the ability to craft clear and precise prose.

Why Bezos Thought Writing Matters

In June of 2004, Jeff Bezos sent a memo throughout Amazon with the subject title, "No PowerPoint presentations from now on at S-Team."² In the early days of Amazon, the S-Team would do weekly four-hour meetings that focused on execution on various projects. Each deep dive would begin with the typical oral-presentation-backed-by-PowerPoint-slides by the relevant team, which simply wasn't working. "The format often made it difficult to evaluate the actual progress and prevented the presentations from proceeding as planned. The deep dives were, in short, frustrating, inefficient, and error prone for both the presenter and the audience."³

Seeking a better answer, they latched on to Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within", in which he wrote, "As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution-intense, the more damaging the bullet list becomes." This fit the problem they were seeing: their topics were complex, interconnected, requiring plenty of information to explore, yet the PowerPoint linear sequence of slides was not flexible enough, nor was the presenter-led approach. "Besides, the Amazon audience of tightly scheduled, experienced executives was eager to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. They would pepper the presenter with questions and push to get to the punch line, regardless of the flow of slides. Sometimes the questions did not serve to clarify a point or move the presentation along but would instead lead the entire group away from the main argument. Or some questions might be premature and would be answered in a later slide, thus forcing the presenter to go over the same ground twice."⁴

Despite the heartache and churn the memo caused, they felt they had found a root cause problem: "The real risk with using PowerPoint in the manner we did, however, was the effect it could have on decision-making. A dynamic presenter could lead a group to approve a dismal idea. A poorly organized presentation could confuse people, produce discussion that was rambling and unfocused, and rob good ideas of the serious consideration they deserved. A boring presentation could numb the brain so completely that people tuned out or started checking their email, thereby missing the good idea lurking beneath the droning voice and uninspiring visuals." (Emphasis mine.) ⁵

Writing as Explanation

Amazon found, as many others have, that moving from PowerPoint to Word as the presentation format forced a deep change in the presentation itself. Ideas would need to be fleshed out more fully, with only the words on the page to carry the weight of the proposal or insight, rather than the force of personality (or relative position in the org chart) of the presenter. This approach is not simpler or easier--in fact, it is much more difficult, on both sides: "... this model imposes duties and expectations upon the audience as well. They must objectively and thoroughly evaluate the idea, not the team or the pitch, and suggest ways to improve it. The work product of the meeting is ultimately a joint effort of the presenter and their audience—thinking that they can all stand behind." ⁶

Part of this comes from what takes place during a typical presentation. A slide comes up at the front of the room, with the 6 bullet points each with 6 words. By necessity, each bullet point must be short and an incomplete sentence, with much of the content (and all of the nuance) inferred by the reader. Worse, the presenter is often speaking as the audience reads, forcing the audience to choose one or the other media--either they listen to what the presenter has to say, or they read and ignore the presenter's commentary. Compounding the negative impact, the presenter is typically verbally describing the nuanced elements of some or all of the bullet-pointed statements, meaning the audience has now missed exactly the nuanced take on the bullet points. If an audience member spots the nuance, they ask a question about it, requiring the presenter to awkwardly point out that question was already addressed; if they miss the nuance or say nothing, the nuance is never mentioned again. In any event, the nuance itself, not being captured anywhere in the slide, is only available to those who were in the presentation at the time of its presenting. The slide deck, on its own, is missing a crucial dimension that will be lost to time.

In a written narrative, the linear nature of reading requires the author to spend extra time considering the order and flow of the words on the page. The author may (and most often will not) be present when the reader reads, meaning the author must step back and consider how the reader will consume the document: When will they ask the obvious question? Can I move the answer to that question earlier in the narrative to head that question off? Am I presenting the simplest case first, or the most complex? Much of the writing process is, in fact, editing, in order to make sure that the readers are "getting it" the way the author intends. ⁷

Readers do not want to wade through a 5,000 page novel to understand the quarterly performance numbers, however; brevity matters. Amazon found that six pages, 11-point font, single-spaced, is the right length for a presentation designed to take an hour. Attendees to the presentation enter the room, receive a printed copy of the narrative, and spend the first twenty minutes reading. (Roughly speaking, an average reader fluent in the language can read one page every two or three minutes.) The narrative is free to include additional material, such as charts or graphs or other material, in an appendix, but the mandatory reading material may go no longer than six pages. Any attempts to go beyond that length are summarily rejected. This brevity forces the presentation not only to be consumable within a single hour-long meeting slot, but also the narrative itself to be tightly focused. Many writers throughout history have learned this lesson. ⁸

Writing as Branding

For those who do not work at Amazon (and/or do not aspire to), writing still offers clear benefits. In the highly-interconnected World Wide Web, opportunities abound for well-written prose to catch an audience's eye and create positive reaction. Granted, the Web currently contains trillions if not quadrillions of characters, all clamoring for time under our eyeball, and most of it is worthless. This is, however, nothing new--Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th-century German philosopher, recognized the same problem: "In his essays, On Authorship and On Reading, he identified two types of authors: those who write for the sake of the subject, and those who write for the sake of writing (and really, for the sake of making money). Their motivations couldn't be more different. The former write because they are curious and they want to figure something out. They're like a detective, exploring a subject from all sides, trying to come to a deeper understanding. For them the process of writing is how they figure out what they don't know and how they come up with new ideas. The latter because they get paid by the word, not the insight. You can recognize the latter by how they stretch out half-baked thoughts 'to the greatest possible length.' Their writing is evasive, 'lacking in definiteness and clearness.'" ⁹

This, as an aside, is the primary reason why ChatGPT will, over time, prove to be highly inefficient as a tool for creating effective prose. While it might know facts and figures, because it lacks the ability to reason and understand the underlying ontology or mental model of the subject under discussion, it will never be able to speak in "definiteness and clearness" effectively. In fact, at least to the date of this writing, where it does attempt to speak with such specificity it usually falls victim to hallucination and/or error.

Those who can put forth prose in a manner that is clear, precise, and direct on a given topic will find that their reputation--their "brand", as the marketing-savvy put it--will grow in a positive direction. Moreover, because the prose stands apart from its author, the message and meaning of the narrative will not be diminished regardless of the author's timidity or introvertedness.

Writing as Reasoning

Conclusion

Appendix

Endnotes

Bibliography

Working Backwards, ...

The PR-FAQ Framework, Calbucci, ISBN ...

Revisions

(I thought some readers might find it interesting to see some of the material I wrote for this paper, then discarded.)

From the moment humans uttered their first guttural grunt, communication has been mankind's evolutionary advantage. Lacking fur, or claws, or a sharpened sense of smell, early humans found that with the ability to communicate came survival. One discovered that furs could be removed from animals and worn to provide warmth, another discovered that sharp rocks at the end of a stick make for a useful weapon, while yet a third discovered that if you take a burnt piece of stick and scrape it on the inside of a pelt, one can string together different symbols and characters in a semi-predictable way, giving rise to writing. This gave the ancient hominid a significant boost over its contemporary cousins, because not only could writing allow multiple humans to share of the same knowledge, that knowledge could be gained without having to re-discover it each time, and the written pelt could be handed from individual to individual, passing both down through time as well as from tribe to tribe.

---

Tags: writing   career  

© 2025 Neward & Associates, LLC | Mixed with Bootstrap v3.1.1 | Baked with JBake v2.6.6 on Aug 12, 2025, 7:12:28 AM