Save the stories for books and movies. At work, your reader just wants to know how the story ends.
Writing a chronological narrative puts conclusions and recommendations at the end. Busy people will do one of two things
- They won’t get to the end (especially if your story is boring) and will never see your conclusions.
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- They will skip directly to the end (missing out your story to get to the bit they are interested in)
Here are two better ways to structure a document.
First, you could accept the reader only wants the conclusions and recommendations so write them an executive summary.
If you have to write a longer report try the telescope approach. This puts the most important information first.
1️⃣ Start with the summary, conclusions, and/or recommendations.
2️⃣ Follow this with analysis of the issues, context and evidence.
3️⃣ All the background material, the methodology, research findings, processes, etc comes last (possibly in appendices or in a separate document at the end of a hyperlink).
If you really want to improve the documents you write, ask me for help.