A book titled The Essentials of Technical Communication 2nd Ed. by Tebeaux and Dragga has some practical points on what they call business writing. The most memorable quote of the book is perhaps "No one wants to read what you write" and while comical is true. The point they make is that the more work you do behind the scenes to make a document informative and easy to read the less work the reader needs to do up front...and the is what technical writing is all about. Regrettably there is no template to make a perfect document because technical or business writing is a dynamic field changing both format and content based on the audience and purpose of the writing. What Tebeaux and Dragga do give us is what I consider fundamentals and boundaries. Fundamentals are the basics that make a document successful such as the design principals (Alignment, Proximity, Contrast, Repetition, Forn&Color). While boundaries are things that make a document a failure such as plagiarism, moral conflicts, or misinformation. The goal is to make a document easy to read using any tools available to you within a budget and have the content as informative as possible without having too much content. Too much content deters readers but not enough and the document loses its purpose.
No one wanting to read what you write is definitely comical and something I had never truly thought about within the work place. But thinking about it, it is true anywhere you go. In school it may be required to read and edit a paper but you never truly get a full analysis of what youve written and edited thoroughly. So thinking about it definitely makes sense which is why clear, easy-to-read, concise articles and documents are essential everywhere and not just the work place. Unless it is in a book that the individual picked up on their own for their personal enjoyment it can be quite a hurdle to get a good peer edit and full opinion of a document.
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