Researchers who want their work widely cited/taught should spend 80% of their time devising one beautiful figure that captures their main findings.

(I am so often frustrated wanting to teach a paper only to discover no simple exhibit that gets the gist across.)

This e-mail from a friend is brilliant and makes my point much better than I did. The highlight:

"Decision-makers are action-takers. Get to the punch line and stop needing them to understand how f***ing brilliant you are and how many sensitivity tests you ran. They don’t care."

Do you need to do all the detailed hard work and think about nuance? Absolutely.

Do you need to show all of those details and nuance so that no one understands what the point is until page 23? Absolutely not.

Write like good journalists do. To a first approximation, your sentences should be ordered roughly by importance.

(With paragraphs whose first topic sentence is a summary of that paragraph's main point.)