Start with the basics. Read a business writing book, articles, or take a course on it. Even a one-hour course will teach you something new. Beyond that, some things that help me address my weak spots:
1. Make sure your first paragraph or executive summary answers the questions: Why does this doc exist? Who is the expected audience? What actions or decisions does the author expect from the audience after reading the doc?
2. Run things through an analyzer like Hemingway[1]. It'll point out obvious things to fix.
3. Do a reverse-thesaurus editing pass. Remove adjectives and flowery language where possible. Challenge yourself to lower the reading level. Even if your audience has PhDs they'll read and comprehend simple language faster.
4. Do an editing pass for missing numbers. Vague language, unsupported assertions, and missing quantities make arguments easy to refute. Look for words like "many", "most", "a lot", "major" "severe" "large" and replace them with hard numbers where possible.
5. Do an editing pass for "So, what?" and remove anything that isn't necessary to support your core argument or purpose. Assume your audience is smart but has very little time. Too much detail will make them start to skim and miss things. Appendixes are your friend here. Leave links to appendixes for readers that have questions or want more detail.
6. Nothing beats a human reviewer. Professional writers have editors too.
Write more and find ways to get feedback on your writing. It's important to get outside input to help you see the things that don't work and experienced readers/editors/friends/coworkers can often provide suggestions on how you can fix it.
This. and: It really helps if you work in a culture that values critical feedback on thinking and writing. Too many readers will pass on an opportunity to offer critical feedback, either because they don’t want to offend or because they didn’t read it carefully and critically enough. Having someone read a doc and tell you it’s good feels good, but in general doesn’t help you improve (and is actively harmful if the document is mediocre).
One way to encourage this helpful criticism is for authors to accept feedback gracefully and have a policy to ask questions only for clarification of the feedback (to understand the feedback better) and never to engage in the debate response of explaining why what they wrote is good enough.
(The minute you debate them on the first of seven points they have, they’re going to deprive you of much of the value of their feedback on the next six because you’re seeming defensive at worst or exhausting at the least.)
Suggestions are great. Whats better is just taking anything that people don't understand as "area for improvement". Then write it and see it it's better. Iterate. You'll learn your own style.
Of all the very specific suggestions and recommendations, this really is the best one. There is really simple technique for getting better at anything: do more of it.
I wonder if this is simply because human brains are just create specialized neural pathways for special tasks that occur more frequently. So it takes a lot of effort for someone who has never driven a car to drive but after they learn driving it’s automatic (same for language and any other skill)
One way would be to read a lot of the type of writing you want to emulate.
But you'll get the best results by putting a lot of directed and specific practice into it. Ben Franklin wrote about his method in his autobiography. He would try to reproduce passages he admired from memory. Then he would check his work and repeat until he reproduced it verbatim. Then he would repeat but try to improve it.
Another possibility to take a writing class at a local community college. A lot of it is common writing strategies like how to organize thoughts (spatially, conceptually, temporally, etc). And as others say, practice. The classroom is nice because it forces one to practice and gets feedback from the instructor or writing lab (most schools I’ve been to have them)
My advice is to take a step back and consider what you want the reader to take away from what you've written. Then make sure it flows, so as you introduce one idea, make sure what you wrote prior is enough in terms of pre-requisites,
When I started at amazon I was encouraged to pitch a project or feature once a month. More importantly I was encourage to write up things I disagreed with or try to sell stuff that was very half assed, and work on getting it to a real idea.
As I did this I got better and better. I can write up 3-5 page design docs in about 1-2 hours now and these can bootstrap others into your thinking very easy. I've found that they also just ground an argument when everyone is arguing about totally different things. Even if they are now all arguing AGAINST your idea, you've made progress.
It's just a muscle you have to exercise. And iterate with feedback. Learn from where people have trouble understanding your document. If they don't understand it, take it as feedback that you are not clear enough.
