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The Uniform Writing Code

Many of the persistent problems for writers and readers in organizations can be understood within the framework of what I call the uniform writing code. This code, explicit or implied in the structure of almost all organizations, confronts the writer with choices that often bring loyalty and responsibility into conflict. Such conflicts create ethical questions that, unresolved, make good writing under pressure impossible. Successful writing in organizations depends on transforming the code. The Organizational Point of View The writing code includes a number of injunctions about tone and attitude. Organizational writing is expected to be positive; to present, internally and externally, the best case for the organization's conduct. At times, this may mean not writing what the writer knows. Organizations blessed with consensus have an energy that turns problems into prospects. Labs, departments, and new or revivified organizations have this spirit when everyone feels they contribute to a common goal. But organizations in trouble almost always begin by attributing their problem to a failure in "getting their story out." There is an inevitable tension between reality and appearance, and one pressure on anyone who writes in an organization, in good times or bad, is the need to consciously avoid any subject, fact, or analysis that might shake the reader's confidence in either the organization or the writer's role within it. A writer who wants to survive adopts the organizational point of view. For many people, this positive attitude is a learned behavior that eases daily life, especially in relation to colleagues and supervisors. In some organizations, there may be only a rare occasion when the organizational story does not fit the writer's experience or knowledge. In others, such a conflict can be a constant of daily life. A staff assistant or a manager may see the difference between stated policy and actual practice. A professor may be surprised by the story the college catalog presents to the outside world. But for the writer, there is the pressure not only to affirm the organization's conduct but to avoid communication that might cast doubt upon his or her capacity to affirm it. A writer's inquiring or deliberative tone might be interpreted as "indecisive" or "negative." Your intended reader may want to know what to do, not what to doubt or ponder. Communication is greatly simplified if both reader and writer share the organizational point of view. But the price for such consensus is often high. While the formats for writing in organizations--different memo forms, models for correspondence, guidelines for research summaries and proposals--seem to require objectivity, they reenforce the underlying, subjective version of the organization's conduct. The pressure of this injunction to display an unquestioning, positive attitude while writing from the accepted point of view, stifles thinking and undermines the writing process and product. Tact Tact supports this commitment to an organizational stance: no matter what a writer has to say, it is almost always more important to say it in the right way than to say it at all. If there is room for negotiation or dialogue, it is initiated through an understanding of the vulnerabilities of those above and below the writer in the department or agency. Skill in working with others takes on a special quality in the day-to-day life of an organization because it signifies not only maturity but predictability. Professionally, for a writer, this predictability may become far more important than identifying problems, proposing alternatives, or resolving conflicts. But it is an expectation that wrecks havoc on his or her capacity to think clearly. Anyone with supervisory responsibility in small or large organizations understands the appeal of these attitudinal expectations. But when they pressure writers to contribute to an illusion of meaning, they create a communication problem that corrodes an organization from within. Almost all of my writing clients from business and government have been convinced, at one time or another, that writing is a matter of affirming the values and goals of those above them in a hierarchy. The concept of "telling them what they want to hear" is reflected daily in a sluggish flow of documents, memos, and letters, few of which are worth reading, although we may be required to write or to respond to them. Such writing assignments contain no argument; no deliberation. We recognize useless writing, but we don't have a sense of how to make good writing matter in an organization. We feel helpless to change the environment. People who complain about the writing in an organization generally mean one of two things: either the writing isn't clear, or the writing doesn't "look" professional. But "clear" writing about a point not worth making, or empty correspondence perfected by a word processor's spelling checker, deepens the communication problem. The self-defeating effects of inadequate or cynical writing expectations may be delayed, but they are inevitable. As people who write, we all feel much more resilient and energetic than the uniform writing code permits. We have far more creativity than our organizations elicit from us. If an organization defines dependability for its writers as a positive, tactful, loyal approach and style, it cannot realistically expect writing to be clear, responsible, and powerful. Especially under pressure, the code conflicts with our struggle to write well because that struggle always requires the writer to take responsibility for his or her own words. Brevity In any organization, brevity is the familiar ideal of writing. People in general--especially people under pressure--admire writing that "doesn't waste words." These injunctions carry over from our school days: "Cut all excess words," or "Be concise." The theory makes sense: never use a word unless it contributes to meaning. But in practice, this expectation creates confusion and fear. People try to be brief instead of explaining what they mean, or struggling to put their ideas into words. In institutions, these fears are sometimes linked with professional survival. A cabinet secretary gave classic expression to the organizational ideal of brevity some years ago: "Anything that can't be put down on one page isn't worth reading." The damage within the department and outside resulting from people trying to live up to such a foolish ideal can be enormous. Given the amount of writing we all read in organizations, this pressure for brevity is certainly understandable. Even before scientists, doctors, and scholars began to complain that they could no longer keep up with the literature in their fields, people in business and government were swamped by reports, memos, documents, and articles they were expected to read, analyze, and respond to every day. But if there is so much writing, and so little of it is worth reading, why hasn't the ideal of brevity been the obvious solution? This paradox results from a failure to distinguish between causes and symptoms. Brevity is valued as an organizational skill to resolve the crush of time and information. But in a context in which a positive approach, tact, and loyalty to an organizational point of view are insistent pressures on the writer, brevity becomes a quality of appearance, not of meaning. Writers with a great deal of experience learn to squeeze as much meaning as they can into each word and sentence, and to take out every word that does not count. Their priority is not a word count, but fitting meaning to a structure that efficiently and adequately expresses it. But under the pressure to be brief, people without much writing experience fail to explain their ideas, conclusions, and recommendations. They leave out those connections that give their arguments coherence and unity. That is why we read so many memos, letters, and reports that make almost no sense at all. In some cases, they present the disconnected, fragmented surface of an unarticulated argument. In others, they offer little more than an assertion without evidence, compactly crafted to the assumed needs of a particular reader. How could it be otherwise? Being brief is a blessing if writing has a point to make, and evidence to support it. But it may be impossible to make that point and support it in one page, or even in one hundred. I remember reading a one-page summary of a one-thousand-page report that had taken eight people six months to write. Even the summary, on the basis of which a cabinet secretary made his decision, consisted of half a page of titles and numbers identifying the manager of the project. The report's recommendations, compressed into a few sentences, affected thousands of people, and involved a great deal of money and resources. But reduced to a few lines, these recommendations lost their rough edges, their indigenous warning signals, their internal conflicts. They were reduced to little more than a predictable slogan. The research may as well never have been done. You might argue that there is a time for thinking and a time for acting. But the appearance of efficiency was deceptive and dangerous. The cabinet secretary's demand for brevity neither ensured efficiency within his department nor, ultimately, hid the actual chaos from public view. Instead of inspiring intense research, analysis, evaluation, and then compression, the writing code moves people in the opposite direction. If a writer knows that only his or her recommendation will be considered, and if he or she is expected to anticipate the recommendation the reader wants to hear, then the whole process of research and writing takes on the air of a performance, the appearance of thought, not the process and product of thinking. If the one-page summary of a report is written by someone who did not do the research, and who interposes his or her own interpretation of what the reader wants (or ought) to hear, then brevity reenforces confusion and even deception. The pressure of time is not an excuse for incomplete, confusing, or misleading writing. The problem lies in a concept of efficiency that at best fails to take into account the nature of good writing, and at worst seeks to streamline policy around the values, goals, or work habits of a few people. It may be that describing gray areas, raising ethical questions, or analyzing the nature of a policy will slow readers down. But the virtue of good organizational writing is that it enables a reader who has delegated thinking and writing to others to examine material more thoroughly, and compare alternatives. Brevity is not the cure for the communication problem. It may be one of the causes. As an abstract notion, brevity can be a comfort to people who don't want to read. But as a concrete reality of day-to-day life in organizations, where people inexperienced in the process and product of writing abide by a code of tact and team spirit, brevity becomes the resolution of an inability to think issues through. "Tell Me What You Want Me to Say" It's not surprising that writers in organizations struggle to discover what their readers want to hear. But in this kind of environment, communication becomes a self-sealed system with a restricted set of permissible statements within a rigid format. Thinking and meaning give way to affirmation and the appearance of meaning. Brevity, reenforcing appearance, narrows the channel of communication and clogs the flow of creative energy. The effect of the code on the individual writer is equally dramatic. People who return to school for mid-career degrees or executive training programs find it hard to explain what they think, or to give evidence for why they think it. Habituated to the shorthand of their own organizations, and to meeting the narrow expectations of an audience which has power over them, they find it difficult to criticize underlying assumptions, consider other perspectives, or integrate their own experiences with new information and ideas. The uniform writing code has resulted in a model of communication that is the antithesis of discovering and presenting meaning. The writer's process of finding out what he or she thinks, of using writing as a way to discover meaning, has atrophied in the practice of telling readers what they want to hear. Once people realize they have more to offer, more to say, and better ways of saying it, they may try to change the environment to encourage better writing. But there is an even more fundamental problem, over which the individual writer has almost no control, contributing an enormous pressure against good writing: we all inherit the dialects of our organizations. Dialects Business, government, and the professions have idiosyncratic, exclusive languages of their own. These dialects are often the subject of satire. There are recurring lists of words that shouldn't be used, and classic examples of indecipherable or absurd memos. The older lists are fascinating as verbal nostalgia. Looking back over the last thirty years or so, we can review our history through the words, phrases, and metaphors that saturated the language: "separate but equal," "domino theory," "the light at the end of the tunnel," "trickle down." Contemporary lists of words that have lost their meaning may help make us selfconscious about the words we use. But while these lists give us insight into the relationship between language and culture, they remind us of how vulnerable we are in our search for meaning. Dead words replace living ones, and diminish our capacity to discover and present ideas. Dialects are not simply a shorthand to save time but a protective covering for the ingrained policies and practices of an organization. To gain some perspective on the pressure these dialects exert on writers, imagine a software program that incorporated all current and past lists of dead words and rejected them in our letters, memos, and reports. This would certainly shorten our documents. What would remain? Try this with one of the documents that comes across your desk. Cross out everything that doesn't convey fresh meaning, even the old standby, "You have asked me to . . ." (you knew that already, and so did the writer). Then read it again, to take out everything that the writer has put in simply to win you over to his or her message. Take out everything that merely demonstrates a positive attitude, tact, or loyalty to the organization. There probably isn't much left over. But that's not as surprising as the nature of what remains. Instead of the kernel of an idea or the real substance of a proposal, as you might expect, there are only fragments of both. What's left is not the essence of the subject, but the introduction to an argument or an explanation. As the reader, you're probably left with a question like: "Yes, but why?" or "What do you mean?" Perhaps you missed something. But if you go back over what you have cut, all you'll find are those dead words, the stroking words to win the reader over, the words and phrases that automatically accompany certain formats. For all its pragmatic appearance, the substance of much organizational writing is not explicit but implicit. What is explicit is not terribly complicated, and usually not very useful. What is implicit is fascinating, but often confused, fragmented, and unresolved. Part of the function of a dialect is to obscure this confusion. In any piece or organizational writing there is an inherent tension between surface appearance and inner turmoil. It is extremely difficult to subdue language in this way and then try to use it to write with clarity and power. Writers in societies less free than our own have had to depend on allegory, symbolism, or fantasy to circumvent moral or political censorship. But the potential for discovering meaning is one of the main reasons why writing is useful, and why the possibility of sharing that discovery with a reader is so exhilarating. That is where jargon and dialect fit in, and why they survive. Dead words take up the space that thought might fill. In an environment in which fresh, passionate thinking is unsettling, adherence to a dialect constitutes a message in itself: that the usual rules apply, that the hierarchy is in order. This is how we know we can ignore almost everything that comes across our desk unless we find a key word or a phrase that calls for closer attention. We can skim with confidence because there will be no surprises, nothing fresh to respond to or consider. The languages of organizations and professions are filled with indigenous jargon. Even highly trained writers who use a dialect self-consciously, with irony or chagrin, can be convinced of its necessity. People with little writing experience may not even question a dialect, struggling instead to become proficient at it. But organizational languages encode conflicting ideas, values, and goals, and cancel out meaning. Jargon survives not because we are lax in weeding out the latest vicious set of meaningless or overused words, but because the words we use often have more to do with survival in an organization than with fresh ideas, clarity of analysis, or meaning. Our organizational dialects code the underlying assumptions of our work lives. They allow us the brevity, decisiveness, and loyalty we admire, under the pressures of time and the need for tact. But they make it difficult to think on paper; and in narrowing the basis for taking responsibility for meaning, they obscure information, confuse analysis, and undermine communication. From "I" to "It" Nothing points up the loss of the writer's responsibility for meaning more vividly than abandoning the first-person pronoun, "I," in favor of its organizational or professional surrogate, "It is to be believed. . . ." Although it raises the word count, this shift to passivity, ostensibly to prevent subjectivity, saves the reader time. "I" can be troublesome, raising time-consuming questions: "Who is the writer? Has he or she any right to claim my attention? From what point of view is this person speaking?" By avoiding the first person pronoun, the writer participates in an institutional authority. Science writing long ago established a peculiar authority for impersonality and the use of passive voice. This machine-style prose, apparently swept clean of personal interest, gathers into itself a kind of generalized responsibility: the organization, or the profession speaks, not the individual whose thoughts, whether superficial or thoroughly supported, are expressed in his or her own style and voice. The distinction between "It" and "I" is certainly not the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. In organizations, it is more often the difference between obedience and responsibility. With impersonal language that studiously avoids the first person pronoun, it is often impossible to trace the history of a decision in an organization. Instead of insuring objectivity, the shift from "I" to "It" protects subjectivity from analysis and judgment. The impersonality of business, government, and professional writing not only inhibits thinking, but permits all kinds of mischief. In a discussion among collegues about the war in Vietnam an economist referred over and over again to "human resource units": moving two hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there. I envisioned the docks in Oakland filled with neatly stacked cardboard boxes, but when I asked him about it, he seemed puzzled: "Human resource units? They're people, of course." I'm sure that is perfectly good professional shorthand, but it is an example of the mischief dialects create: language stripped of human reference, content devoid of humanity. The shift from "I" to "It" (reenforced by teachers at every level of education) pressures us to separate thoughts and feelings from responsibility. The Ethics of the Uniform Writing Code The uniform writing code at its best elicits compact, supportive writing. If it is done well, the writing will distinguish clearly among various perspectives, needs, or clients. But not many writers have the confidence and experience to overcome the destructive pressures of the code. In many organizational settings, conversations among people who work well together are more important than the written word in making policy or adopting new ideas. Writing, by people not involved in the original discussions, follows such conversations. The writer's work is seen as a service: making clear, lobbying for, or enforcing decisions made by others. Since there is almost always this distance between the decisionmaker and the writer, it is easy to see why there is so much frustration and disappointment with organizational writing. If you are in a supervisory position, you want to hire people whose job is to write what you meant to say, or would say if you had the time or skill. But that service function as it exists throughout a hierarchy is neither one of the great virtues of good writing nor one of the inducements for writers to struggle to write well. If writing in an organization was simply a service, all the books and courses on business or government writing would long ago have solved the communication problem. These textbooks are full of sample letters, and the courses are full of memo exercises. There is a general understanding that writing should be brief and clear. Yet much of the writing in organizations is unreadable because of the inherent conflict between obedience and responsibility. The documentary history of the Vietnam war, the correspondence leading up to the Challenger tragedy, and the developing history of the Iran-Contra scheme provide countless examples of memos, position papers, reports, and letters that adhere to the uniform writing code. They are impersonal, decisive, and loyal, and they are expressed in the appropriate style and language. Yet they are terrible pieces of writing which have caused tremendous suffering. Reading them over, anyone would wonder how the gaps in thinking, the incompleteness of evidence, and the bizarre fantasies expressed in dehumanized dialects could have escaped notice. But the writing code forces words and responsibility apart. At any point in any of these tragedies, a writer could say, in his or her own defense, "I was only doing my job." Obedience and good writing do not mix. Writing well, especially under pressure, requires hard thinking and taking responsibility for one's words. It's no wonder that so many people in organizations adopt the code without question. Responsibility for a policy, a product, or a program is a heavy burden, but the uniform code disperses responsibility: no one takes the blame. In such an environment bad writing drives out the good. If the environment hardens into regimented affirmation, implementing policies that cannot be continuously analyzed and evaluated, it becomes unstable and dangerous. When incomplete, biased, or deliberately misleading writing pierces the walls of an institution and enters the public domain, it causes considerable damage. Writing is no different from any other skill that combines carftsmanship and art. You can apply a brilliant coat of words to a deteriorating argument, or persuade people that a glittering fantasy is a sturdy possibility. But these uses of language undermine communication. To say that we have a "communication problem" is to identify an issue much deeper than spelling, jargon, tone, or format. Writing is hard enough. To find ideas that matter and words to express them requires patience and confidence, in situations characterized by insecurity. Writing in organizations is embedded in still another layer of pressure: telling readers what they want to hear. How do people resolve these pressures and produce thoughtful, clear, powerful writing? Part of the answer is that writers in organizations have to do more of the kinds of things every writer must do: more preparing and planning, more sifting of thoughts, more balancing of writer's and reader's needs. Organizational writing has a responsibility to educate its readers. Writers have to press for authentic communication in everything they write, whether to a supervisor, a customer, or a colleague. To write well in an organization one must overcome a communal numbness to meaning, and begin to help people develop the skill of good reading. Writers and readers form the act of communication together, and they both must take responsibility for it. Our "communication problem" will not be solved by isolated writers toiling to find the right tone or the appropriate format, but by organizations transforming the pressures of the environment in such a way that effective communication is possible.

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