Written by David Saez
A proposal goes out on a Tuesday. It gets opened on Thursday night by one person, sitting alone, in the middle of deciding something. Nobody is there to explain it.
I write that kind of document for a living. The subject matter is astrology, which is unusual, but the format is not: long pieces, sixty to eighty pages, addressed to a single reader who is generally facing a decision that matters to them. Twenty years of it, several hundred documents. After that many, some things stop being preferences and start being patterns, and they seem to hold for anyone whose work arrives as text.
Who you are actually writing to
Most professional writing gets addressed to a segment. The mid-career client, the cautious buyer. Segments are useful for planning and get in the way the moment you start writing sentences, because a segment has no particular worry, and prose written for nobody in particular tends to read like it.
The alternative costs nothing. Before drafting, find one sentence the reader actually said or wrote, and write toward that. An actual sentence, not a persona assembled from several. It changes the vocabulary and the rhythm, and it changes what gets cut, and cutting is where most of the work happens anyway.
Two questions, and the order matters
The question someone asks is often standing in front of a different one. Pricing questions can be trust questions. Someone asking about the timeline may want to know who takes the blame if the date slips, and a tidy, well-behaved question is sometimes there to find out whether it is safe to ask the untidy one.
Both need answering. What took me longer to understand is that the sequence does most of the work. Answer only the surface question and the reader feels handled. Skip past it to what you have decided is really going on, and you have made an assumption about somebody who never invited it, in writing, where they cannot interrupt you. Plain answer first. Then the thing underneath, said without ceremony.
If I could get one habit adopted by everyone drafting client-facing text, it would be that one.
The reader is alone
This is the constraint that changed my drafting most. A document is read in the absence of whoever wrote it. Whatever ambiguity survives the final edit gets resolved by the reader, on their own, quite possibly on a bad evening, and usually in the least generous way available. There is no clarifying remark, no chance to notice a frown and rephrase.
So the last pass I make on anything long asks a single question: where could this be taken as a judgement rather than a description? Not whether it is accurate or whether the tone is right. Just that.
It is also why careful documents fill up with the qualifiers that marketing instincts want to delete. The tends to, the in many cases. They look like hedging. Mostly they are there to stop a description from hardening into a pronouncement about somebody who is reading alone and has no way to argue back.
None of this is efficient. Writing toward one sentence, answering twice, hunting for accidental judgements: it adds hours to work that could be produced faster. The return arrives late and quietly, in the form of people who read something years ago and write to you about it anyway.
Author Bio:
David S.R. is a professional astrologer with twenty years of practice, based in southern Spain, where he writes long-form natal chart readings for an international clientele. His free guides and essays are at astrodavidsr.com.