Guide to Group Doc Writing / Meta Writing
Summary
- Writing skills are incredibly important as it helps us learn how to better communicate ideas and resolve arguments, think problems through and build consensus, inspire yourself and others. There are plenty of courses on how to improve your personal writing skills, and therefore the focus of this note is not personal writing skills.
- Instead let’s focus on a more challenging writing setup, which is a group writing. The challenge comes from writers having different perspective on the overall message, context awareness, writing style, etc. Hence it typically takes longer to produce coherent writing with clear message that writers have agreement on.
- Group writing surfaces surprisingly frequently, including co-authoring design documents, jointly writing proposals, preparing leadership reviews, etc.
- I would like to share a rather simple technique that helps me quicker get group writing done with clear message, coherent narrative and well leveled information presentation.
Motivation
We all have encountered at one point or another a group writing experience that have taken too many iterations to complete, the content pieces felt like unfitting puzzles and readers’ questions emphasized misunderstanding.
Note that it can happen in various set ups, including
- Co-authoring or preparing design documents for review
- Jointly writing a proposal intended to be shared with external audience
- Preparing a review for the leadership
The reasons for this experience can be plenty, the ones I’ve observed are
- Writers’ internal disagreement or misunderstanding on who is the audience and what should be the overall message
- Writers’ different perspectives and depth of the context on the subject
- Writers’ approach towards individual pieces as isolated blocks of information
- Writers’ attachment to an already written content
Hopefully all of the above can be addressed with little overhead by the proposed technique.
Technique
Before diving into the technique itself I would like to make probably an obvious note. This technique might or might not work for you, at least I hope you can some useful patterns and adopt it for your writing experience.
Core ideaWriting a document should similar to entering a swimming pool in a group while holding hands, start shallow and slowly go deeper together.
The swimming pool metaphor is not accidental. Imagine trying to enter swimming pool with random depth everywhere.
In other words the writer group needs to build agreement and content incrementally from abstract to concrete (just like software design) while making sure deeper levels adhere to shallower levels.
Let’s look into the main tool of this idea.
Meta tagsUse meta tags in the document to reflect incremental progress on agreement and content building.
It will become obvious shortly what this means, meanwhile think of it as higher level abstractions that you are trying to implement (e.g. meta tags are interfaces and content of the next level is the implementation that adheres to the interface).
Meta tags will be heavily used to incrementally build agreement and content by the group of writers. Meta tags will remain in the document until very end, to make sure at any point in writing we trace our path. Note that as we are walking into the pool we must not stop holding our hands, in other words we do not move to the next step until we agree on the current.
We are starting with
1. Define audience and message<AUDIENCE: …><MESSAGE: …>These meta tags set the context for the writers on who are the readers and what message we would like to deliver. This is the main tool to deliver targeted message.
It is critically important to first build and formulate agreement amongst writers on audience and message as everything else will be built on it. For example
<AUDIENCE: Engineers and managers co-authoring design documents, jointly writing proposal for external audience, preparing leadership reviews><MESSAGE: Group writing is hard but a little discipline and low overhead technique can speed up writing and improve content quality>
Once we know our audience and main message
2. Structure main message and set goalsSection A<GOAL: …> Sub-section B <GOAL: …>Section C<GOAL: …>This meta tag set the goals the writers would like to achieve after the reader completes reading a particular section. This is the main tool to deliver coherent narrative reflecting the message.
Essentially we are defining how we are going to deliver <MESSAGE> to our <AUDIENCE> incrementally, it represents the reasoning flow and ensures narrative coherency. For example (note how we are incrementally building this exact note!),
<AUDIENCE: Engineers and managers co-authoring design documents, jointly writing proposal for external audience, preparing leadership reviews><MESSAGE: Group writing is hard but a little discipline and low overhead technique can speed up writing and improve content quality>Summary <GOAL: Reader relates to the group writing challenge and
interested in learning the technique to improve.>Motivation <GOAL: Reader remember prior painful experience and agrees with
reasons why it was painful>Technique <GOAL: Reader understands the technique and relate every steps to
the motivational pain>Benefits <GOAL: Reader agrees with the benefits of this technique>
Once we have message narrative
3. Define means to deliver message<TEXT: …><FIG: …><GRAPH: …>These tags define how particular part of the message is delivered. This is the main tool to ensure proper information depth and breadth.
This represents means of how we are going to achieve <GOAL> for each section while keeping the breadth and depth of the message delivery in tact. For example (note how we are keeping all meta tags written so far to continuously check that we are not deviating),
<AUDIENCE: Engineers and managers co-authoring design documents, jointly writing proposal for external audience, preparing leadership reviews><MESSAGE: Group writing is hard but a little discipline and low overhead technique can speed up writing and improve content quality>Summary <GOAL: Reader relates to the group writing challenge and
interested in learning the technique to improve.> <TEXT: Summarize sections below>Motivation <GOAL: Reader remember prior painful experience and agrees with
reasons why it was painful> <TEXT: Summarize the pain of the group writing> <TEXT: List typical cases where group doc writing appear> <TEXT: List observed reasons for the pain>Technique <GOAL: Reader understands the technique and relate every steps to
the motivational pain> <TEXT: Introduce main idea behind the technique> <TEXT: Incrementally introduce steps that address motivational
pain points, including lack of agreement around targeted message,
coherent narrative, well leveled information depth and breadth>Benefits <GOAL: Reader agrees with the benefits of this technique> <TEXT: Formulate benefits as addressed pain>
Note that we haven’t written a single line of content however we already have incrementally built agreement on the targeted message, coherent narrative and properly leveled information presentation.
Now we can branch out and start writing individual pieces in parallel without fear of repeated rewrites due to unclear message, incoherent narrative or different depth or breadth of information presentation!
4. Remove meta tagsOnce writing is done and checked against core message and goals meta tags can be removed.
Benefits
Hopefully this low-overhead technique will help you get writing done with clear message, coherent narrative and well leveled information presentation, by
- Avoiding unclear message or undefined target audience
- Creating well structured narrative that delivers the message incrementally through clearly defined goals for each part
- Avoiding reader confusion due to different level of depth and breadth of information presentation
- Reducing number of rewrites and pain associated with it due to built agreement before the actual writing starts
