Writing

One typo cost $150 million dollars. How? When NASA launched its first probe to explore Venus in 1962, Mariner 1 started having problems 90 seconds after launch. With navigational controls jeopardized, an abort command was issued and the craft destroyed at the five-minute mark.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke called it “the most expensive hyphen in history.” He was right, but it was more subtle than that. The actual typo was a missing overbar in a smoothing function used by the guidance system to adjust for minor variations of velocity.

Typos are just one of many problems in writing. There have been many times I have added extra semicolons in code, mistyped simple words, or butchered entire sentences. Especially in English, where rules come with many exceptions, it’s easy to make mistakes. Just look at the use of the comma.

Grammar and typos are only a small part of a bigger problem. The state of writing quality has become abysmally low. Bad writing costs America nearly $400 billion every year. People are noticing the depressing reality of today’s writing skills. In a recent survey, 81% agreed with the following statement, “Poorly written material wastes a lot of my time.”

Poor writing has infected every nook of the corporate world. The copy in most of the sales prospecting emails and proposals I receive is stunningly bad. Forget about engineering and product management writing in documentation and blogs, which might be technically correct, but filled with leaps in logic and flow. Marketing is perhaps the worst perpetrator of terrible writing. The rise of content marketing has produced a constant stream of thought leadership pushed via whitepapers, blogs, and social media. Yet all they are producing is content filled with buzzwords and business speak, and AI is making it worse.

What we write matters. If we cannot clearly and concisely convey our ideas, effective communication and collaboration are impossible. All we create is confusion and chaos. Good writing saves us from lost time, angry confrontations, unnecessary work, and avoidable mistakes.

How do you begin to improve your writing skills? This framework from Harvard Business Review is a good starting point:

Do:

· Plan what you will write before you write so your words logically flow.

· Keep sentences short and concise to convey one idea or point.

· Strive for clarity by avoiding jargon and “fancy” words.

Don’t:

· Resign yourself to the belief you can’t write. Anyone can improve their writing.

· Pretend that your first draft is acceptable. All writing requires editing.

· Bury your ideas. Lead with your main points as soon as possible.

There are also many rules around spelling and grammar in English that are easy to confuse. For example, subject-verb agreement errors are common. Another mistake is mixing up the use of words like “that” and “which” or “affect” and “effect.” Don’t rely on your brain to catch these mistakes, use tools like Grammarly to help catch these gotchas. The now retired Amazon’s Fact of the Day One blog also has some great pointers you can review (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

While all these tips are helping, the most important lesson in writing is finding your unique voice. As Ernest Hemingway said:

Good writing feels natural like you are speaking with someone. When you bring your authentic self and weave personality into your writing, your words have the power to influence others. The opposite is to sound like a brochure or pretend you are some very important or educated person. That leads to writing that is robotic and uninspired.

How do you find your inner voice? You write more often and make it a habit. Daily journaling helps, which can unlock ideas in your head. Many people carve out either early mornings or before bedtime to write for a set amount of time. Others are more spontaneous and jot down ideas throughout the day. For example, I use a note-taking app to record and noodle on thoughts as they come.

Once you are regularly writing, the next step in leveling up your writing is to share your thoughts in public. Over a decade ago, I took inspiration from Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) to a start blog to build up my credibility as an investor in the NYC tech community. I wrote every day and a lot of it makes me cringe today. However, it succeeded in raising my profile in the startup community and vastly improving my writing.

I still write regularly. I post this newsletter weekly . Before that, I wrote two newsletters for engineering leaders and B2B sales professionals that were also on a weekly cadence. I published a book back in 2020 called Community-in-a-Box. Taken together, I have written over one million words in the past several years, all of which are available to anyone on the Internet.

Writing in public is a forcing function. It forces you to think more, edit more, and question more. I have even reversed my views sometimes because of the clarity I gained from writing down my ideas. Being public also keeps you accountable. The comments and feedback I have received have helped to further refine my ideas and fine-tune my wording.

My time at Amazon Web Services further pushed the quality of my writing higher. Writing is core to the culture of Amazon. Meetings do not start with discussion but with silently reading a prepared document from 2 to 6 pages in length. Only once everyone has read the document and left comments does the discussion begin. When any new idea is proposed, the first step is not a presentation with bullet points but with a document called a PRFAQ (press release and frequently asked questions). Why insist on using long-form, narrative style? Because writing full sentences and paragraphs paints a complete picture of the ideas being communicated, nuances that are missed in the presentation format.

Every major initiative at Amazon, whether a new service, program, or mechanism, got its start with a well-composed written narrative. Then it would go through several iterations of document reads and comments from peers, managers, and senior leadership. Sometimes the feedback would be brutal, especially for those who were new to Amazon. However, it also ensured that all narratives met the high bar for quality so that the ideas being proposed were clearly understood in terms of what was being proposed, what the value to the customer and Amazon would be, and the results expected.

Good writing is a superpower at Amazon for getting things done. Elevating your writing can open doors, build influence, inspire others, change minds, and launch movements. It shows you are a problem solver and thinker, a distinction that is critical when you engage with decision-makers, whether investors, customers, or executives. Writing well speaks volumes about your credibility and competence when key decisions are being made.

Do you believe writing could be a hidden superpower for you? How would you use writing in making better decisions for your startup?

Mark Birch

So I landed in Taiwan and here for a couple of weeks. If you want to meet up, let me know! I will be around doing startup building stuff and finishing up the book.

Two minor changes regarding this newsletter is that the external website where I host the archive of this newsletter has a new home. It is still hosted on Beehiiv, but now with a custom domain. Also the email reply has been changed to go to my main email address so I actually see the replies in a timely fashion.

Outside of that, not much news but will share more of my various meetups here in the next week’s edition. Hope to catch up with many of you soon!