How to write a year in review post
The retrospective is the only post here that announces nothing. It is also published in the same fortnight as every other company's, into a feed where the reader has already seen nine of them.
It contains no news and arrives with a hundred others
Every other announcement has a fact at its centre that did not exist last week. This one has a summary, published at a moment fixed by the calendar rather than by events, competing directly with every other organisation doing the same exercise on the same days. Two consequences follow. The first is that novelty has to come from the selection rather than the subject, because the subject is already known to anyone who was paying attention. The second is that the only genuinely scarce content in the category is candour: nearly all of these posts list successes, so a named failure is the one thing a reader has not already seen this week. It is also the part that makes the successes believable, which is why the honest version outperforms the triumphant one.
The rule for this one
Name one thing that went wrong and what it cost. The successes are only credible in its company.
What the category publishes, and what the rule produces.
The first draft is a composite written to match the register the ranking pages for this query actually publish. It quotes no company and no real post. The second obeys the rule above and nothing else, so anything that changes between them is the rule doing it.
The version everyone posts
What a year it has been! We launched three major features, welcomed eight new team members and grew our community beyond anything we imagined. Thank you to everyone who has been part of the journey. We cannot wait to see what next year brings!
The version that obeys the rule
Three things shipped this year and one of them should not have. The scheduling rewrite in June was late, broke recurring posts for nine days, and we should have held it. The other two, exports and the calendar, are the parts people actually use daily. Next year is one thing, done slowly.
It is a list of good things and an exclamation mark. Every company publishing that week says the same, so it carries no information, and the absence of a single difficulty makes the rest read as public relations.
6 of 10 measured dimensions moved.
Both drafts were read by the engine behind our free brand voice generator. It is arithmetic over the text rather than a judgement, which is the reason it is used here: every figure below can be checked by counting the draft printed above it.
| Dimension | Before | After | Moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentences | 4 | 4 | No |
| Words | 44 | 52 | Yes |
| Average sentence, in words | 11 | 13 | Yes |
| Longest sentence, in words | 18 | 19 | Yes |
| Contractions per 100 words | 0 | 0 | No |
| Speaks to the reader | No | No | No |
| First person (we, our, us) | 4 | 1 | Yes |
| Second person (you, your) | 1 | 0 | Yes |
| Vocabulary richness, out of 100 | 84 | 83 | Yes |
| Contains a stock phrase | No | No | No |
Read across all fifteen moments the pattern is sharper than any single page: the hub has the corpus numbers.
What earns the post
- The decision you would take differently, described without a lesson attached to soften it.
- The two or three things that actually mattered, rather than everything that shipped.
- What next year is not going to include, which is more informative than what it will.
When not to post it at all
Skip it in a year where the honest answer is that not much happened. A thin retrospective is a public statement that the year was thin, delivered in the format least able to hide it.