Watch Out for Low Resolution Writing

From Karl Sutt’s post How to communicate effectively as a developer, two images:

left: "I checked it and told her it's not working properly."

right: "I checked the foobar.py script and told Sarah there was a bug related to updating the users table in SQL - the script does not seem to update the last column."
left: Hi team... the worker is having a bad time. 

right: Hi team, the email sending worker keeps crashing with the following exception. I've tried re-running, clearing the cache, re-installing dependencies. Can I get a hand.

The images on the left are what Karl calls “low resolution” writing, while the right is “high resolution.” Pretty obvious when you look at it here, but high resolution essentially means more specific, detailed, and includes necessary calls to action. It’s extremely easy, in the context of something like Slack, to be low resolution. Watch for it!

I like Karl’s post in part because you might hear people ([cough], like me, regularly) talk about the importance of writing. I rarely say it, but I mean any writing. Not just stuff like documentation, emails, and blog posts, but short-form and often casual writing as well, like Slack and GitHub comments.

🤘

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