Writing For Somebody - Marc's Blog

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Sometimes I write long emails to people at work. Sometimes those emails are generally interesting, and not work-specific at all. Sometimes I share those emails here on my blog. This may be one of those times. Always write for somebody. Always have an idea in your head, as you’re writing, who your writing is intended to communicate with. Sometimes, that’s a particular person. Your boss. A mentee, or mentor. Bob from legal. Sometimes it’s a group of people, or a kind of person. Sometimes its your future self, or past self1. I find that having a particular audience in mind allows me to focus my writing better, to communicate better, and make myself more likely to achieve my writing goals. To have empathy for them as a reader, as I would have empathy for somebody I was trying to communicate with face-to-face. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to distill empathy into a structured approach. But thinking about a particular audience does make for a somewhat useful, if incomplete, checklist: A

About Me My name is Marc Brooker. I like to build things that work, and do cool stuff. I like building big things. I also dabble in machining, welding, cooking, and skiing. I am an engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Seattle, where I work on agentic AI, especially safety and policy for agentic AI. Before that, I worked on EC2, EBS, databases, serverless, and serverless databases. All opinions are my own. Links My Publications and Videos @marcbrooker on Mastodon @MarcJBrooker on Twitter Is this blog written by AI? Writing For Somebody Who's there? Sometimes I write long emails…

Writing For Somebody - Marc's Blog

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