Most people edit for grammar. I often edit for geometry.
I have a habit. It’s deliberate but quiet, and most people read right past it.
In presentations, product emails, announcements, anywhere I write a list or series of short paragraphs: I find myself formatting each line so it’s slightly longer than the last. Precisely longer. So you could draw a straight line from the end of the first down to the end of the last, and clip every line ending in between. A staircase of words descending the page.
I keep doing it.
The Tree
A few years ago I sent a product announcement. The product was codenamed after a type of tree. I followed my usual pattern. Taken further than usual that day.
A colleague replied with a single question:
“Did you purposefully make this one look like a tree?”
I told him yes.
I looked back at what I’d sent.
The blocks of text. The sections that built, line by line. Each paragraph slightly fuller than the one before. It wasn’t just parts of the email this time. It was the whole email laid out like one of those freehand Christmas trees you’d scribble as a kid. Narrow at the top, wide at the base.
The product was a tree. The email was a tree.
I’d followed the same ritual I always do. But that day it had scaled further than usual. Applied not just to the bullet points, but to the shape of the entire communication. Top to bottom. I hadn’t planned it.
The Payoff
The constraint actually does something useful.
When you’re tweaking phrasing to hit a length target, you re-read every single line. Carefully. Deliberately. Repeatedly. You’re not scanning. You’re measuring. To the character. I’ll even swap ‘and’ for ’&’ to land a line exactly where it needs to be. Or reach for a synonym. Sometimes fancier, sometimes more mundane. Whichever picks up or sheds the length I need. And in that measuring, you catch the awkward word. The redundant phrase. The sentence that almost made sense.
That process produces accuracy. It produces clarity. Both, covered by being fussy about how a page looks.
That careful read also forces a different question. Not just: is this right. But: will they know what it means for them.
Here the habit quietly betrays itself. Brevity suffers. Brevity holds for the higher lines. The lower lines sometimes run longer than they strictly need to, just to earn their place in the staircase. Filler words creep in. Occasionally the right-length word beats the best word. That’s the honest cost. The careful review is still worth it.
The constraint also makes the process enjoyable. Editing becomes a small creative puzzle rather than a joyless act of error-correction. Enjoyment is chronically underrated as a productivity driver. It means I actually finish the edit. Properly.
It’s not a compulsion. In a hurry, I skip it. It’s more a ritual I follow when something is worth reviewing properly. A signal to myself that the communication matters.
The Rule
This isn’t a new idea.
Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies built a creative practice out of arbitrary rules. The Oulipo writers produced extraordinary literature under rigid structural constraints. Sonnets exist. Chess exists.
Self-imposed constraints don’t limit creative work. They focus it. They give you something to push against, and that resistance is where craft happens.
My diagonal finish is a tiny, silly, typographic version of this. But it follows the same logic: the rule creates the work.
The Shape
A list could look like this:
- Fix deployed to stage this morning.
- Testing passed.
- Sign-off from the business came through this afternoon.
- Release window confirmed for Thursday.
- Comms going out Wednesday evening.
Mine would look like this:
- Fix has been deployed to stage.
- Testing passed & nothing flagged.
- Sign-off came through this afternoon.
- Release window is confirmed for Thursday.
- The comms are going out Wednesday evening.
The same information. Mine has a shape.
I never thought to name the shape. Some quick research: it’s a trapezoid. Right-angled, to be precise. There you go. Always learning.
The Quirk
Something else worth naming: colleagues remember it.
Not consciously, perhaps. But the person who sends emails with that particular quality reads differently. The clean, considered structure. Each line placed rather than poured. Feels different to receive.
We talk about personal brand in abstract terms: voice, tone, positioning. But it also lives in the small, repeated choices that accumulate quietly over years. The things people associate with you before they can explain why. I can’t prove it. But I feel it.
A diagonal finish is not a brand strategy. But it compounds into one.
The Confession
I don’t broadcast it.
Until now, it has existed as a private game. Something I do in the margins of actual work, for no audience except my own mild satisfaction when it lands just right.
What’s your version of this? The small, weird, craft-driven thing nobody asked for, with no job title or KPI attached, that you do simply because the work feels more like yours.
Most good communicators have something. A tic. A tell. A tiny act of care disguised as quirk.
The diagonal finish is mine.
What’s yours?