[jrauser]

Jeff's letters to shareholders are pretty good. Here's a recent one: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...

Because of its audience and goals it's necessarily less technical and more essay-like than a typical s-team memo. For obvious reasons, I can't link to any of those.

An example that's close and is in the public domain is Jacobsen's TCP slow start paper: https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf. He's advocating a specific change in the TCP protocol and marshalls evidence beautifully to make his argument.

[dingaling]

There's a lot of padding and ambling in that memo. For example the entire first paragraph would have been more parsable as a list of achievements. And then there is this:

"may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more."

Everything after the clause "... then ever before" is superfluous. Shareholders know what sort of information customers can obtain, and how. He implies that with the weak "and more" at the end. But too late, he has already wasted the reader's time.

I'm not particularly impressed by that writing style, it reminds me of 16 year olds trying to impress me with their verbose history essays.

The idea of business writing is to COMMUNICATE. If the reader reads an entire paragraph and hasn't learned anything new then the author has failed. If the reader needs to use a highlighter to pick-out pertinent information from a sea of words, the author has failed.