Memos drafted by a model wander because they reach for generic nouns. "Significant improvements", "various stakeholders", "meaningful progress". The reader spends the whole memo waiting for a concrete thing to react to. Often it never arrives.
The one-number rule
Every paragraph should have at least one specific number, name or date that a model could not have invented. "7% increase", "4 customers", "by Friday", "the Singapore team". The number is what the reader will remember; everything around it is connective tissue.
Before
Following recent discussions, we have identified several opportunities to drive significant improvements in our processes. Various stakeholders have expressed support for moving forward, and we believe substantial progress can be made in the near term.
After
Three things came out of last week's review with the Singapore team: (1) the invoice-export job is failing on 6% of runs; (2) we have three customer-side complaints about it on file; (3) the fix is a one-week engineering swap. We'd like approval to swap Priya off the dashboard work next sprint to do it. The export will then be reliable before the Q3 close.
Search-and-cut: a thirty-second pass
Before sending, search the memo for the words "various", "several", "significant", "substantial", "meaningful" and "opportunity". Each one is a candidate for replacement with a specific. You'll find three or four; cut them and the memo gets sharper almost immediately.