The quiet discipline of an institutional document

A document written for a senior institutional audience is not written in the way that other documents are written. The constraints are different. The audience is different. The consequences of failure are different. Most of the craft principles that produce good writing in a general register produce, in this specialised register, a document that reads well on the page and performs poorly in the room.

I have spent three decades reading, writing, and editing such documents. What follows is a short note on what I have come to understand about the particular discipline the work requires. It is neither complete nor systematic. It is simply the set of observations I most often find myself passing on to younger colleagues, and occasionally to the authors of documents I have been asked to review.

The first observation is that the senior institutional reader is not reading for pleasure. She is reading for information, for judgement, and for the answer to a specific question her role requires her to answer. The writing should respect that reality in every sentence. A document that asks her to enjoy it is, in practice, a document asking her for something she did not come to give.

This has a practical consequence that many writers resist. Elegant phrasing, metaphor, and well-turned rhetorical structures are not always friends of the institutional document. They have their place, particularly in the chairman's letter, the keynote address, and the occasional passage of narrative framing. But as a general register across a long institutional document, they slow the reader down. They ask her to admire the writing when she came to extract the judgement. The best institutional writing tends, on rereading, to seem almost invisible. The reader does not notice the sentences. She notices the conclusions.

The second observation concerns the question of voice. Institutional documents are usually produced on behalf of an institution, rather than by a single named author. The voice that emerges should be the institution's voice, and institutional voices have particular characteristics. They are measured. They are not given to strong adjectives. They acknowledge uncertainty without wallowing in it. They concede the legitimate counter-position before advancing their own. They are, above all, not in a hurry to persuade, because they understand that persuasion imposed too quickly on a senior reader is counter-productive.

A document that sounds, in its early pages, as though it is trying to win an argument, often loses the argument in the last pages. The reader, sensing the pressure, resists. A document that simply lays out its analysis, with care and with candour, and trusts the reader to arrive at the natural conclusion, often wins positions it had no right to win, because the reader feels she arrived at them herself.

The third observation is about the management of uncertainty. Institutional writing almost always deals with matters in which some things are known, some things are estimable, and some things are frankly unknown. The temptation, in drafting, is to collapse these categories. The unknown is dressed as the estimable, the estimable is dressed as the known, and the whole structure proceeds with more confidence than the underlying analysis can support. Senior readers detect this almost immediately. They have read too many such documents.

The discipline is to keep the categories separate. To say, with full confidence, what is known. To say, with appropriate caveats, what is estimable, and to show the reader how the estimate was arrived at. To acknowledge openly what is unknown, and to explain what the document proposes to do in the face of that uncertainty. A document that does this reads, to a senior reader, as a document written by a serious person. A document that conflates the categories reads as a sales pitch.

The fourth observation is about length. Institutional documents tend toward length, because the process of producing them involves the input of many stakeholders, each of whom has a section they wish to see included. The natural entropy of the process is additive. Without a strong editorial hand at the centre, the document grows with every review cycle.

This is a mistake the document cannot recover from. A senior reader who has been given a fifty-page document to read in a thirty-minute window will read it as a fifteen-page document, which is to say she will read the first five pages, the last two, and skim the rest. The analyst has produced fifty pages of work and received, in effect, a fifteen-page reading. The only honest response is to write the fifteen pages. What remains can be offered as an annex, for the reader who wants it.

The fifth observation concerns the physical shape of the document. This is less discussed than it should be. A senior reader forms an impression of a document within seconds of opening it, well before she has read the first sentence. The density of the typography, the generosity of the margins, the treatment of sub-headings, the care of the page breaks, all signal something about the document's self-regard and, by extension, about the institution that produced it. A document that looks cared-for is read with more patience than a document that does not.

This is not an argument for decoration. Institutional documents should not look decorative. They should look unhurried, well-bred, and confident. The difference between a document that looks this way and one that does not is almost entirely a matter of attention to small things. The space between a heading and the paragraph that follows it. The consistent treatment of numbered references. The absence of widows and orphans at the bottom of pages. The sense, throughout, that someone has cared about how this document meets the eye.

The sixth and final observation is that the best institutional documents do not, in the end, read as documents. They read as a conversation with the reader. A single considered voice, speaking to a single considered reader, about a matter of substance that both take seriously. Everything else is architecture around that central exchange. The architecture can be excellent or poor, and it matters, but it is architecture. The exchange is the building.

In my experience, this quality is the one that separates the documents that survive from the documents that do not. A document that achieves it will be read, and reread, by people for whom the author is now only a name on the title page. A document that does not will be filed, politely, and consulted only in the circumstance in which there is nothing else to consult. The difference, almost always, is not in the analysis. It is in the discipline of the writing. A discipline that is, in the end, quiet. Quiet and, where it is rightly done, almost entirely unnoticed.