Today I received an email containing documentation for an important meeting scheduled to take place later this week. I was about to print one of the documents, an Excel workbook, and decided to “print preview” it first, and good thing I did – it was not set for print.

For some reason, the term “executive summary” came up more than once in my conversations with a few different people last week. I found myself explaining what the purpose of an executive summary is, and why “We shouldn’t be calling this “executive summary” – given the content of this section, the title is misleading” or “Yes, this document has both an executive summary and an introduction, and this is fine”. This was somewhat surprising, and I thought that it’s worth writing about here.

On large projects, when different people work in parallel producing similar documents, consistency in format and level of detail becomes a priority. While we can’t expect to be able to ensure that all of those documents look and read like they were written by the same person (ideally – ourselves, because who else knows better?), we have to strive to minimize variations.

I haven’t posted in a while, been busy thinking about ways to promote this site (your advice and help with this are welcome) – so, to make up for that, today’s post is extra-long.

Whoever invented post-long-weekend Mondays is not a nice person. Anyway, three days of family and friends visits (=constant overeating + drama) are over, back to work! Some highlights from last week:

Being exact with your language and providing enough detail saves time and effort, especially in written communication, since we don’t always have the opportunity to gauge the reader’s reaction and jump in saying “well, what I really meant here was…”. Today I want to talk about two very important components of clear writing: sufficient detail and consistency in terminology.

one of my school teachers, a truly exceptional lady, once told me about her father, who didn’t have a chance to go to school as a child, and learned to write only when he was in his forties. he was very proud of this achievement, and wrote frequently to his friends and family. she showed me one of his letters. it was written in very neat and legible cursive, and i noticed that almost every other sentence contained an “unexpectedly” capitalized word. i asked her about it. she smiled and said that her father believed that “learned” people use capital letters, so, to give his writing a more “distinguished” appearance, he would capitalize words randomly. many years have passed since then, but i still remember how moved i was by that story.

recently, my teacher’s father’s writing popped into my memory, as i was reviewing a document filled with sentences and phrases where every word was capitalized (no, those weren’t titles). today i want to talk about capitalizing words, and, as a protest against unnecessary, excessive, redundant, and pointless capitalization, i am not using capital letters in this post.