What’d he say?
I’ll get to some examples further down, but two consistent elements of the experience strike me with particular force:
First, as in any writing class, we make sure that everyone understands the basics of “language conventions” (a polite phrase for grammar) — sentence structure through punctuation to parallelism to active verb voice and beyond.
Then comes the all-important “what” of writing. What do we write about? How do we keep it interesting enough to hold the attention of both writer and audience as each participant reads a final draft (following several rewrites and peer review) aloud?
The answer, I’ve found, is to assign a straightforward description of their jobs in plain (not boring) English. They struggle with that because it’s too easy to lean on bureaucratic language that works inside their agency, but is likely to annoy and confuse outside readers such as congressional aides, budget officials at the White House or, most importantly, real citizen constituents — veterans seeking benefits or legal aliens applying for citizenship, for instance.
What comes next is where the laughs and not a few tears come in. I ask them to write an informational or instructional memo about what they do best. Shopping with your wife, mixing a Red Bull/vodka cocktail, slow-cooking Chicago-style ribs, getting on the Boston “T” (subway) without paying, closing up a Cape Cod cottage for the winter — you name it, the expertise flourishes. And inevitably, a writer describing the travails and lessons of being a single mother or parent of an autistic child brings her compelling tale to a close with an emotion-choked voice, and the rest of us applaud.
At the end of the process, they’ve absorbed this one powerful point: Maybe I’m not such a bad writer after all.
Next, a note to bosses: “If you send your people to a writing class, honor their time by letting them express themselves in a more professional manner. DO NOT edit them the way you’ve always done. You probably aren’t as clever a writer as you think, so stop being so obsessive. I bring this up because every class reaches a point where many hands go up when I ask, ‘How many of you think your supervisor will change your writing to his or her style no matter how much you learn in this class?’”
How bad is government writing?
Examples abound, and I’ve puzzled over one big question for years: Why do bureaucrats — the private and nonprofit sectors certainly aren’t immune on this point — act so officious and even pompous when they put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard? Why can’t they write like they speak (some researcher found that by far most of us speak in the active verb voice, while up to 80% of workplace writers fall into the passive and wordy voice)? Put another way, why do they write like public masters instead of public servants?
Very few of us talk this way:
There’s more, much more, but, as I tell writing class participants, “Length alienates.” You should see their paragraphs...on and on and on, without one single decision about organization. As a newspaper editor once told a young reporter who complained that his article was already too short to be trimmed any further: “Can’t be cut? Son, I could cut the Lord’s Prayer.”
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