Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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National Writers’ Workshop
1. Envision a general audience. Your goal is to take responsibility
for what readers know and understand about the issues.
2. Control the pace of information. Don’t try to squeeze everything
into the lead. Think of yourself as writing for World Book Encyclopedia.
Your job is to create a clear story that would help a high school
student write a good term paper about an issue.
3. Introduce characters and concepts one at a time. You can build
a citizen’s understanding by explaining one concept, say the flat tax,
and then building on that. The next step: Show the relationship to the
sale of homes. The next step: Show the relationship to charitable contributions.
4. Repeat the most important information. Help people understand
what is most important by revealing it in different ways: perhaps with
a statistic, then with a quote or sound bite, then with an anecdote. Build
interest.
5. Keep the story simple. Not simplistic. Use shorter words,
shorter sentences, and shorter paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity.
Introduce complexity with sentences such as: “Here’s how it works.”
6. Use numbers selectively. A single telling statistic will be
more powerful than a glut of them. Don’t let the story bear the weight
of heavy statistical cargo. Pull it out in a chart or a graph.
7. Translate jargon. Politicians, experts, wonks, lawyers, and
even journalists use language to exclude. When you translate technical
language to promote citizen understanding, you practice a high democratic
art. Read “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell.
8. Look for the human side. But when you focus on a person, recognize
why: Is it because he or she represents a large class of people; or because
he or she stands apart from a group?
9. Communicate the impact. Say my family income is $80,000 a
year. Say I give about $3,000 a year to charity. Say I pay about $4,000
a year interest on my home mortgage. What will the flat tax mean for me?
10. Keep the story short. The value of the well-written short
story is not its superficiality, but its selectivity. Filter out the less
important information, so citizens can learn what is truly important.
11. Read the story aloud. Do you write in the voice of one human
being in conversation with another?
