Data Authors: Skilled Designers of Data Presentations - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 91

It is also important that cheaper types of reading, if hitherto followed, be
dropped. Popular magazines inculcate a careless and deplorable style which is
hard to unlearn, and which impedes the acquisition of a purer style.”
—H.P. Lovecraft in Literary Composition
Serve your Audience
Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless
audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it
doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that
sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an
imagined person and write to that one.”4
—John Steinbeck, from an interview in the Fall 1975 The Paris Review
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the
world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.5
—Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story
Discover the Core Message of Your Story
A short story must have single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
—Edgar Allan Poe
The solution to a problem—a story that you are unable to finish—is the problem.
It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem,
properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits
the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
—Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and
N ote b o o k s , 19 6 4 -19 8 0
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell
with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is
going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should
cockroaches eat the last few pages.6
— Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story
Perhaps the most relevant guidelines for an author of data products comes
from The Unpublished David Ogilvy, 7 in a memo to his staff:
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think
well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.