Why we write
A prospect asked me last week if I could send the diagnostic deliverable as a slide deck instead of a document. It was a reasonable request. Slide decks are what most consulting outputs look like. I said no.
Not because I have anything against slides. I use them sometimes. It's that the discipline of writing the recommendation in prose is doing something specific that I don't want to give up — and I want to be honest about what that is.
Slides let you skip the argument.
You can put "Recommendation: consolidate onboarding to a single flow" on a slide, add a couple of supporting bullets, and the audience will nod along. Nobody has to say out loud why they agree, because they never got the connective tissue that would let them disagree specifically. The argument sits in the presenter's head. It doesn't survive the meeting.
Prose won't let you do that. If you write "we should consolidate onboarding to a single flow because…" — you have to actually finish the sentence. You have to name the assumption, the tradeoff, the reason the alternative is worse. When you can't finish it well, you find out at the desk instead of in front of the client. That's a much better place to find out.
The other thing writing does is stay useful after the meeting ends. Slide decks decay fast. A month later, the client can barely reconstruct what the deck said, let alone why. A written memo can be reread, quoted, forwarded, argued with. Two of my former clients have sent me back a paragraph from a diagnostic memo years after the engagement ended, asking whether it still applied. That doesn't happen with slides.
There's a smaller, more selfish reason too. Writing the argument out reveals to me — the person supposedly making it — whether I actually have one. I've written recommendations that I was sure of in my head, then watched them dissolve on the page because the reasoning wasn't there. I would have delivered the confident slide version and been wrong. Prose saved me from that more than once.
None of this is an argument against slides for everything. Presentations to a board where the point is alignment, not analysis — slides are fine. Explaining a chart, showing a screenshot, walking through a process visually — slides. But the recommendation itself, the actual claim about what to do and why, belongs in prose. That's non-negotiable for us.
The prospect took the memo instead. They emailed me two weeks later to say they'd forwarded the second paragraph to their board and it started an argument. That, actually, was the point.
— K