Raw capture â raw/make-better-documents.md
url: https://www.anildash.com/2024/03/10/make-better-documents/ title: "Make better documents" author: Anil Dash date_fetched: 2026-08-01 date_published: 2024-03-10 tags: tech, communication, best-of, business, most-popular
Anil Dash shares recurring advice he gives people about making working documents (resumes, reports, budgets, etc.) more effective, noting that "we almost never actually teach people how to use the ordinary tools of business communication."
Start from empathy; ask who you're addressing, what they need, and what context they bring. Dash warns against documents that begin "with a lengthy, off-putting, deeply insular recitation" of the author's insecurities. His key advice: "Start from common ground, identify the shared goal."
Cites Joey Cherdarchuk's "Clear off the table" post. Use bold sparingly, italics rarely, never underlines, and at most one or two colors/fonts. "Something that is bold, italicized, underlined, and brightly colored means you don't know what's important."
You can't have too much of it. Use bullet points ("spray them with bullets") to aid skimming, and avoid meaningless clip art and stock photos: "Visual noise has a huge cost."
Apply consistent styles for spacing and margins. Inconsistent formatting across slides makes audiences "try to deduce the semantic meaning of a change that you didn't even make on purpose."
People assume the first item in a list is most important, so front-load key pointsâor explicitly note if ordering is chronological.
State conclusions up front; don't build dramatic tension. Also, "put the important points on the page" rather than in speaker notes or appendices.
Provide outlines, use a limited color palette consistently across sections, and summarize data in chart titles so readers know "here's what these data show."
Constrain choices, like asking a child "Do you want spaghetti or chicken nuggets?" instead of an open-ended question. A prompt like "How can we do better?" is "a philosophical debate, not a prompt for an organization to make a choice."
Restate first principles and shared values; this gives audiences "psychological permission to believe that you have their best interests in mind."
Name files for how the audience will search for them laterâinclude your name/organization, date, and topic context. Avoid names like "Meeting with Sam" or versioning like _final_final.
Dash ends with a playful sendoff: "just pretend that the underline button in your apps doesn't even exist anymore."