How to Write with Style
Source: https://archive.org/details/vonnegut-how-to-write-with-style ↗
Vonnegut's seven rules for writing with style — find a subject you care about, do not ramble though, keep it simple, have the guts to cut, sound like yourself, say what you mean to say, pity the readers.
The essay is two pages, written with the same voice as his fiction, and it is difficult to read it without feeling that most of contemporary business prose violates all seven.
For product direction it is the tightest available argument that clarity is a moral obligation, not an aesthetic preference.
Pair with Strunk for the stylistic foundations and Zinsser for the longer form.
Read it, then reread it whenever you catch yourself writing like a consultant.
Central argument
Vonnegut argues that writing with style is not a matter of ornamentation but of honesty and respect for the reader. His seven rules collapse into a single moral claim: clarity is an act of consideration, not a literary preference. The writer who obscures meaning — through rambling, jargon, or performing expertise — is failing the reader, not impressing them. Style, for Vonnegut, is simply character made legible on the page.
Critique
The essay's central limitation is that it assumes the writer's primary obstacle is self-indulgence — that people write badly because they lack discipline or courage. This ignores the structural pressures that produce bad prose in organizational contexts: legal review, stakeholder hedging, institutional voice requirements, career incentives that reward sounding authoritative over being clear. Vonnegut's rules are sound for the sovereign individual writer, but they sidestep the question of how to write well when clarity is institutionally penalized.
Why it matters for product
Product directors produce documents — strategies, briefs, narratives, reviews — that either generate alignment or obscure the absence of it, and Vonnegut's insistence on saying exactly what you mean has a direct analog in product work: vague product principles, bloated PRDs, and strategy decks that sound confident while committing to nothing are the same failure he diagnoses. His rule to 'pity the readers' is a useful reframe for anyone writing OKRs or roadmaps — the reader is always a busy person who should not have to work to extract your actual position. The essay's real provocation for CPOs is that consultant prose is not neutral; it is a signal that the writer does not yet know what they think.