The Amazon Way of Writing

I work at AWS. It is true we have a peculiar culture around writing. It goes much deeper than this post implies. There are several hour long training courses on writing, leaders are critiqued on their writing and those that can write the Amazon way move quickly through the org. Imagine having to make a decision and you have a concise, well written, data heavy document to read with your peers. It’s one of the many reasons we move so fast.

Making it shameful to start a group meeting discussion without authoring a meeting doc is indeed a great way to cut down on meetings.

One aspect of Amazon’s writing culture that is not so well done is there seems to be a common preference for ultra-wide text lines in the docs. The entire publishing industry knows these are hard to read, so they don’t use them. Not sure why this was lost on Amazon.

Is this only referring to executive meetings, project meetings, or what? Most meetings I'm in finish within 30 minutes so doubling that to sit and read notes sounds pointless, even if it reduces total meetings by half.

Wait, wait, in Amazon form:

Is the scope 100% executive meetings? ~65% of my meetings are under 30 minutes, so the Amazon way seems inefficient.

Do Amazon employees underline every instance of the word Amazon with that orange arrow from their logo, even on whiteboards?

Piggybacking on the post - which courses and books on writing would you guys recommend?