Tell me about a time a document had to make your case for you — a proposal or memo read when you weren't in the room. What did you write differently because of that?

Writing that persuades in the author's absence has to anticipate objections instead of answering them live. How a candidate handles that constraint — structure, pre-empted questions, what they cut — separates writing to persuade from writing to document.

• Who was the hardest reader, and what did you write for them?
• What objection did you answer before anyone raised it?
• What happened after it was read?

A clear picture of who was reading and why they'd resist, deliberate structural choices — the ask up front, detail cut rather than piled on — and an outcome they can trace to the document.

Length worn as a badge of effort, no sense of the readers or their objections, or the document "went out" and the story ends there.