A senior Exxon executive once told me that for presentations to its new business development committee, the company had learned to look at the facts and analysis and ignore the person speaking. The point? The quality of written communication outlives a presentation and even the writers themselves.
Writing is focused on a readership, a message and timeliness for its reception.
Yet at another time, a Commonwealth public servant told me while I facilitated a policy formulation workshop that if her supervisor made one change it absolved her of all textual responsibility. This is an attitude while personally defensive does no good for quality of work in the Australian Public Service. It kicks responsibility for quality upstairs.
The problem of diffusion of responsibility for content is compounded by rapid exchanges via email and multiple layered iterations of draft texts. It regularly renders government writing unattributable and unclear.
It need not be this way. The main features of useful writing are simple. Know your task and its context. Know your audience. Have or train your writing ability for the purpose at hand.
And it does take training. A souvenir from my first week or so in the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1981 shown in the photo below illustrates that writing does not come naturally. In fact, writing needs close supervision, corrections and training to be effective. I’ve learned that the task and context have many elements.
The trick is to train your writing ability through challenge and asking questions.
Always know for whom the text is and its real purpose. Is it a comment on a development to inform, an assessment of trend to advise, or an analysis to frame an issue for assessment?
Your audience is your readership and the higher you go in writing, the wider it becomes, but also the more important. The Interpreter, for example, has a reach of about 3.5 million views per year.
The response to my first draft within the Department of Foreign Affairs was a profound shock, but a wake-up call. I was to refer to a formula for a short five-paragraph National Day message from the Governor-General of Australia to the President of India.
Every line I wrote was crossed out and a clearer formulation inserted. Known and accepted generalities won out over my insertion of a few details. An experienced supervisor added expressions that made the message broad and positive, which, by my stating named subjects, it could not achieve. After all, why would Australia choose these and signal them as priorities in an otherwise dull national day message. There was practice and routine to absorb for even this type of writing.
Elon Musk said the brain has thoughts that draw on many ideas, facts and assessments to communicate. These are compressed into writing, which not only reflects these inputs but can be taken on board and de-compressed by a reader having the same framework of understanding.
Many writers for The Interpreter write to air a view. Research today is easy. Composition of a text can also be palmed off to AI tools such as ChatGPT and its better fee-for-service extensions.
However, having an impact means knowing your audience and adding possible and practicable elements for decision-makers and their advisers to absorb. General smart-sounding summations are too many and too often unsuited to inform influential readers’ needs.
Back in 1981, the task for new players in the Foreign Service was to understand the role of the Department, its expectations, learn how to carry out a work process and add value by thinking, informing and influencing through writing. It was a university education all over again.
Most government officialese is defensive and distances its authors from their advice. Officials distance and protect themselves from issues by using the passive voice, and leave conclusions largely as calls for more time, research, or later consultation and confirmation.
Government officials write and read in a specialist bubble. There are words with denotations and connotations and seemingly anodyne statements, but which are pregnant with implication. Ministerial staff reading draft Cabinet Submissions, Ministerial Submissions and any number of Ministerial letters cannot hope to grasp layers of meaning without deep prior subject knowledge or a sherpa from the bureaucracy.
What’s changed from 1981? In 2017-18, I was Senior Adviser to then Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. Papers coming forward from DFAT to Bishop were always clear, unambiguous and informative, from a base of most likely expert knowledge, especially on international security matters.
DFAT’s work delivered Ministerial Submissions (a formal note of advice to the Minister), Records of Conversation for approval, which I would check against my notes were I to have sat in on the meeting, and drafts of speeches as well as emailed situation reports – for example to inform of voting patterns on United Nations’ resolutions.
The trick is to train your writing ability through challenge and asking questions. In 2018 and 2019, as Senior Adviser to Agriculture Minister David Littleproud, it was clear that from my seat in the Minister's office, at least six out of ten letters prepared by the Department of Agriculture on my topics of responsibility lacked clarity, created insoluble doubt about detail and meaning, or used out-of-date information. There were, for my scrutiny alone, always more than 100 letters a week heading for the Minister’s signature.
The Department of Agriculture official posted to the Ministerial Office complained about my high rejection rate and therefore rework load for her colleagues. I was told to edit them within the Departmental correspondence database and not send them back with handwritten corrections or requests to check or rewrite.
This would have been a mistake for me to have accepted. The reasons were still, just as they were for me about 40 years earlier, learning and training. Without at least having their errors pointed out, that is learning, neither the drafters nor their supervisors would improve or at least pause to self-assess their work. The Department’s indifference to quality would spin unhindered into the future.
As a supervisor, do not worry about striking out and changing staff texts, nor your staff’s authorial vanity, but focus on the message, audience, research and writing.
