The writing style that they teach you in college is built around academic publications: introduction, methodology, lines of evidence, conclusion at the end. That’s great if you want to get a paper published in a journal, but it’s totally the wrong way to communicate inside a company. Almost no one cares about your methodology, and absolutely no one wants to wade through five pages of text before they learn the implications.

If you’re writing for a company, it’s best to use the style that they use in journalism, called the inverted pyramid. All the most important information is in the first paragraph, so you know that if they stop reading after that, they will have seen the most critical stuff. You then cover the next most important point next, and so on.

The reason for structuring the information this way is that people have very short attention spans, and you can’t control when they will tune out. You’ll be losing readers with every line. Therefore, you want them to get the maximum value with a minimum amount of reading.

The same applies when presenting your work to executives. Don’t start your slide deck with methodology; what your audience cares about most is the implications for the business. Follow that up with the insights, then you can have one slide on methodology, and then you go into all the supporting evidence. That way if for some reason they stopped paying attention after two slides, they heard the important conclusions—plus you have positioned yourself as someone who knows what’s important to the business.