Most writing is written for the purpose of being filed, not read. It's as simple as that - it takes exponentially more work to write something that you intend a

Most writing is written for the purpose of being filed, not read. It's as simple as that - it takes exponentially more work to write something that you intend and want people to read. Most engineers just cannot be bothered with such a menial "soft" skill - the information should be interesting enough, right? Well, no. I kind of thought my creative writing classes were a stupid joke at the time, but 15 years after graduating college, it is very clear that storytelling is one of the most effective persuasion techniques I've learned or seen. It's an incredibly effective way of transmitting information - if you can frame your outage post-mortem like a story with a central conflict, rising action, a climax and a resolution, you'll find that it just seems to be repeated and transmitted by itself. Very few people, even engineers want to read a boring timeline that dryly lists what happened in sequential order. Lots of people want to read an adventure starring an engineer who bumbled into a huge conflict and had to fix it before the business imploded. If you find yourself writing things that no one is reading, try making it more read more like a story. we've all known someone who could take some mundane thing like going on a date and make it interesting with a few storytelling techniques. We might even have a few stories ourselves that we've been crafting over the years. Think about the techniques you use to tell interesting stories - misdirection, suspense, shared context and start applying them to your documents. Edit: To clarify: Please don't take the advice that structuring your documents to be more like a story means write one of those posts we all groan about constantly that takes a two paragraph report and turns it into a multipage short story. For God's sake don't start your post mortem doc like: "It was a sunny day in March. Birds were chirping. The air was light and airy. As I poured my coffee into my favorite mug that expressed my personality in porcelain, I knew something was amiss. Today was going to be different." Just consider structuring your documents to be more readable and flowing.