Annotations
The most common, and most serious, problem people have in creating documents is that they don’t consider who they’re speaking to and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Start from common ground, identify the shared goal that you and your audience have, name the ways in which you’re already on the path together, highlight what remains to be done, and then close by asking for their help (in whatever form) for you all to keep progressing on your collective goal.
Bullet points are a super powerful way to make content more skimmable for an audience, and perform a useful forcing function in making you edit your points down to be concise and roughly consistent.
A really common anti-pattern that I often see is needless inconsistencies. For example, people will vary the size, color or emphasis of titles across different slides in a presentation. Sometimes, this is an artifact of their creation — slides with this font came from this team that was working together, but slides with this other font were copied from some older presentation.
The reason we start by saying to stop formatting everything to death is that this then makes it much easier to catch the inevitable inconsistencies and errors in formatting that will arise when you tell a complex story. Audiences are sophisticated, and used to seeing highly-produced media, and are very skilled at the innate human habit of identifying changes in pattern and shape. So they will assume that any change in formatting over the course of a document has some purpose and intent behind it.
If you’re not ordering things by importance (because you want to set up a chronological flow, or because you’re organizing by some historical categorization you’ve inherited) make that explicit in the text that your audience sees.
Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question.