“In Public Policy work, if you can’t write it or say it, you can’t do it.”
As a lobbyist, you’ll spend a lot of your time writing public policy. If you want to improve your craft, read the latest edition of Smith’s excellent handbook.
Good public policy writing is hard work. The rewards of communicating your case well in writing more than outweigh the hard work you’ll need to put in.
Most public policy writing is dreadful. It’s often unclear, imprecise, and does not inform. It confuses rather informs the public policy maker.
There is a special class of public policy writing. That’s the passive-aggressive or straightforward aggressive style. That such writing has little to no positive impact seems immaterial.
Checklists
If you want to raise your writing game, Smith provides a series of helpful checklists to measure your work by.
Checklist 1: Is Your Information:
- Informative
- Believable
- Trustworthy
After all, you are producing an information product. It needs to be coherent, concise and to the point.
Checklist 2: Features of Effectiveness
- It addresses a specific audience about a specific problem
- It has a purpose related to a specific policy action
- It represents authority accurately and ethically
- It uses appropriate form and expression
- It is designed for use
Checklist 3: Measures of Excellence
- Clarity: the communication has a single message that intended recipients can find quickly, understand easily, recognise as relevant, and use.
- Correctness: the communication’s information is accurate.
- Conciseness: the communication presents only necessary information in the fewest words possible, with aids for comprehension.
- Credibility: a communication’s information can be trusted, traced, and uses with confidence.
Checklist 4: Writing Clearly
Tips on Writing a Policy Memo, By Peter J.Wilcoxen
- Be Concise
- Briefly Explain Key Results
- Don’t Drag the REader Through Step by Step Calculations
- Identify the Winners and Losers
- Anticipate Questions
- Don’t Use Unnecessary Jargon
- Use Tables
- Write for an intelligent Nonspecialist
- Focus on Your Results, Not Your Opinions: the memo should include all the facts a policy maker would need to reach her own conclusions and should not emphasise your personal opinion.
- Evaluate Means, not Not Ends: Focus on whether the policy is a good means for achieving its stated or implicit purpose, not whether the purpose is good or bad.
Checklist 5: Ethics. Smith felt compelled to set aside the final chapter (11) for ‘Ethics for Policy Communicators’.
Apart from the golden rules“Write to others as you would have others write to you.” (Williams & Colob, p.125), Smith lays out the following ‘Principles’ to follow:
- Judgement
- Honesty
- Understandability
- Sensitivity
- Civility
Some Asides
Useful suggestions come out from every page. Here is just a sample.
1. On Simplification
Be careful about framing, narrative, metaphor and selective referral (using one part of the problem to represent the whole problem).
You are going to need to simplify, but It’s important to oversimplify deceptively.
2. Policy communication needs to know how, practical skills, and critical thinking.
Your communication is going to provide (1) useful information, (2) relevant and serves action, (3) something happens because of it, and (d) must be publically available.
3. Publically available. It can’t be stressed enough. Everything you write will land up in the public domain. I more or less expect any letter, briefing, or position to land up being leaked. It’s safer to presume what you write is going to going to be public.
This means that the world of real ‘non-documents’ does not exist.
If you go to a meeting, you have to hand over a briefing, and you have to presume it’s going to become public.
If you can’t do that, either just don’t have the meeting, or display a photographic memory during the meeting, and hope your audience has a photographic memory too.
5. If your reader is over 45. Don’t use font 11. Anyone over the age of 45 is going to find it hard to read.
6. Write for the reader. Think about what the reader needs to know. Is it the right type of information – is it a one-page memo or 50 pages of analysis.