Yes, that "wall of text" is a real problem, especially by those who don't realize that "everyone is in a hurry" almost all the time. I solve it by first adding a top-level "executive summary" with all the critical information, followed by a "Details" section with nicely formatted lists with fully-dressed sentences.

And definitely check out the book "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb (there are several editions of this; but any earlier edition would do; I have the 10th edition). I wrote a bit more about it here[1] in the past.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272968

I agree a wall of text will often not be read. But I think often the problem is with the author for having written it in the first place, rather than the reader for not being bothered. It's like that famous Pascal quote, "if I had more time, this letter would be shorter".

One part of that is about redundancy and verbosity: with some effort it's usually possible to say the same thing with a lot less text.

The other part, as you say, is about knowing your audience: an executive didn't read your massive email because they genuinely don't need to. If you can pick out the few bits of information that they actually need to know then that's better for everyone.

An option if you don't wanna write the main document as a pyramid is to write a brief version as an email/DM/What have you but include a link saying for anyone who wants the in depth version it is available for you to read. That way you can structure the document in the way people who expressly want it will find it useful (which might still be pyramid but you aren't constrained to it) while giving the original person what they might need in the shorter form.

I studied journalism in college, and wrote a great deal in the (now archaic, maybe?) style of the inverted pyramid, and learned about writing a great lead.

An interesting thing I read about writing recently is the enormous difference between writing as if you are speaking to yourself, as juveniles typically do in school when they are asked to write a 300-word essay, and writing with an audience and goal in mind, which is everything in business writing.

You last paragraph succinctly states the technique.

Addressing a counterargument in your writing is also extremely useful, and often the hallmark of very convincing writing. You don't need to address every counterargument, but addressing the strongest counterargument to whatever you are proposing or saying is a very powerful rhetorical move that communicates "mastery" of the subject matter, as well as introduces a dash of humility and shelters the writing from the accusation of pure opinion.

I find that the process of writing text is similar to writing code.

You can't just keep piling lines upon lines, at some point you have to stop, re-read everything you've wrote, refactor it, make it simpler, more concise, remove the outdated text/code, etc. etc.

Documentation should always have one global "root" document, which contains links to everything else, and the documentation graph should be regularly reviewed and pruned.

What I would often do was write a result or impact sentence or two, a summary of no more than three bullet points, and a summary of how or where to follow up. Someone who is in 8 hours of meetings a day and receives 200+ emails a day isn't going to read anything longer.

If you have a moment to elaborate please do!

took me a while to understand, then it clicked and I was left writ(h)ing...