Do writing norms shape government decisions?
How we write for government affects what can be said, and therefore what decisions can be made
In a recent post, I reflected on the way that the philosophical assumptions built into academic writing - into the very medium - shape what can be expressed and may hinder one of the key purposes of research: the discovery of new knowledge. Similar dynamics play out elsewhere, hence this post on writing for and by governments.
One of the enduring ironies within governments and multi-national organisations is the gap between their ambitions around communication style, and the reality of what is produced. Governments across the world obsess with plain language or clear communication and there has been a proliferation of style guides over decades. Yet government writing largely remains awkward, difficult for ordinary people to understand and at times almost like a foreign language. As government writing across the world invariably seems to end up like this, it is plausible that the norms of writing for government overwhelm individual efforts to write well. To borrow from Marshal McLuhan, the medium constrains what can be written.
While stilted and bureaucratic prose isn’t great for communication, it is not a major issue if governments are making good decisions and governing well. However, trust and satisfaction with governments are declining across the world. While this will not be the only cause, it is worth asking whether, just as the medium of academic writing can be a hindrance to our attempts to discover knowledge, might the norms of government writing limit our abilities to make good decisions?
The norms of government writing
To start, we need to understand the principles underlying government writing. Despite having spent many years writing for governments (both from inside and outside), I do not know of a good anthropological description. All the writing guides I am aware of take a particular type of writing as given, and give advice on how to improve it. So I am going to offer my own, short description and I would ask my many readers with government experience to critique or improve it.
Firstly, I want to distinguish between government documents that are intended to inform decisions - reports, reviews, briefs, submissions, etc - from those that are written to explain or sell a decision. While the line between these often blurs, there is a sufficient gap in style and purpose to make it a meaningful distinction. I will focus in this post on the first.
For government products that inform decisions, my view is that they are expected to meet four fundamental norms.
Action orientation: writing for government is ultimately aimed at making a decision and doing something - which is why recommendations or proposed actions are almost always the focal point a document is written around.
Neutral objectivity: governments exist and act on behalf of all citizens, and so all writing seeks to be neutral and objective in order to give everyone a voice and enable decisions that represent the best option for society as a whole.
Based in evidence: government decisions should not be made on whims or personal idiosyncrasies, and so written products need to be grounded in reliable evidence and data (ideally with references).
Accuracy with the details: given the power and importance of government, it is important to obsess over getting all the facts, figures, and wording around legislation or implications correct.
It is hard to argue that government writing shouldn’t strive to meet any of these objectives. However, when applied together, my observation is that they generally lead to poor prose and may impose limits on our abilities to make good decisions. It is worth focusing on both some philosophical and practical reasons why this occurs.
Before I get there, it is worth noting there has been a significant change over the past century or two in the medium we use for arriving at government decisions. In the past, decisions were primarily thrashed out via verbal communication - speeches in parliament, or debates around a Cabinet, or discussions amongst a monarch’s advisers. Today, written documents are the primary medium, and verbal debates are normally based on and around the written documents.
Philosophical limitations
Readers will have already realised that modern government writing, as described above, shares many norms with academic writing. Both seek to be objective, with careful, precise language, and ground all the work in the existing evidence.
However, these norms have a shaky philosophical foundation. As I have argued various times, there is no neutral or objective standpoint from which we can achieve knowledge. Pretending we are writing neutrally often means that we simply smuggle in our assumptions, especially as the terms we use are invariably theory-laden.
Moreover, as argued in the case of academic publishing, the ambition to ground all writing in existing evidence ensures that work cannot deviate too far from orthodoxy and it is really difficult to introduce truly novel or innovative ideas. While this can be important to prevent the crazy, disastrous ideas; it also can hinder the potential for crazy and brilliant ideas. The norms of government writing mean that these sorts of ideas are hard to even write coherently, which means they cannot be considered and evaluated.
More practical challenges
Alongside philosophical limitations connected to my arguments around epistemic humility, I see various practical difficulties and limitations that arise from the norms governing government writing. These are observations that deserve to be challenged, so please do - with the caveat that they describe tendencies in behaviour rather than hard rules about what happens. I’ll take each of four norms above in turn and then offer some observations about combined effects.
The action orientation in documents for government decision tends to constrain the options for government in ways that we don’t face in our daily lives. Writing for government is focused on recommendations about what government should do. The focus on doing something means that it cuts against the grain to say that we should actually do nothing, or leave things to someone else as it is their responsibility. We often actively decide to do each of these in our personal lives, but that feels foreign when writing for government. Of note, these sentiments are easier to express in a speech or a debate than they are in a formal written government document.
While we want government reports, particularly from apolitical public servants, to try to speak on behalf of everyone, adopting a tone of neutral objectivity in no way guarantees it. As noted, there is no neutral standpoint from which we can access genuine knowledge. This means, more practically, that seeking to adopt a neutral tone doesn't eliminate perspectives or biases. Instead it disguises them or creates new ones.
All societies include a wide range of diverse, and incompatible, interests and perspectives. Adopting a neutral tone that belongs to none of these has the effect that it inadvertently removes the lived experiences of cultural groups, people who live in different locations, of religious communities or other relevant perspectives from government writing. Such embodied, personal experiences cannot be well expressed or captured neutrally and objectively.1
Despite our ambitions to base government decisions on good evidence, in practice the evidence is almost invariably patchy and equivocal. If there is even evidence that can be referenced, it is often partial, contested or contradictory. The danger in trying to be evidence based is often that it encourages people to write for government as though there is reliable evidence (especially when they include plenty of references). This creates, regardless of whether there is good evidence or not, a faux confidence in the reliability of the reports. The norms here are strong enough that poor quality evidence can be included, or even fabricated, so that reports or briefs read as though they are based on evidence.
The obsessive attention to detail in government writing is often driven by a very real fear of embarrassment (or worse) if mistakes are made. But this dynamic encourages a mindset that can work against good decision making. For one, focusing on the details often distracts people from the bigger picture, which often matters more to the decision that the precise numbers or wording. Another factor is that it encourages a dry, analytical approach that disengages our emotions. Yet emotions are an important element in decision making and without them we tend to struggle to make good decisions.
When the norms are taken as a group, further issues arise.
One issue is that values are critical in any set of policy decisions - what we want our society to be like, how we treat people, what we see as success - are all questions that different people answer differently yet determine the decisions we make. In the end, these come down to choices we have to make. The challenge is that anything that seeks to be neutral, evidence based and carefully objective will be uncomfortable with questions about values and seek to ground them in something other than foundational choices. This will in turn either disguise values as something neutral and objective, or end up with anodyne motherhood statements.
One curious feature of government reports (that are written to support decisions) is their emotional register. The desired neutral objectivity and focus on evidence mean that they necessarily adopt a muted emotional range - strong, charged adjectives and emotions are discouraged or used in limited ways. However, the action orientation means that the emotional register is almost invariably, in the end, positive. Documents are written to explain that this is actually a problem we can fix or can do something about, if only we adopt these recommendations. This cautious, but real, optimism often bleeds through all the writing (we have opportunities, not challenges!) and so government reports tend express a particular kind of technocratic positivity. However, this emotional register is one that has limited appeal and is disconnected from our ordinary experiences.
The Obligatory Recommendations
Given I am writing about government writing, even if this post only offers observations rather than conclusions, I feel obliged to conform somewhat to the norms at play and offer some recommendations. So here are two (limited) recommendations that should help ensure that the norms of government writing don’t impede good decision making. They are not evidence-based (I have no footnotes), but the good news is that you can now use this post as evidence if you see fit. Feedback is welcome, especially if anyone tries them out.
Templates and guides should allow (perhaps occasionally encourage) active recommendations for inaction.
There is a known bias within academic publication where only studies with a positive finding get published. If five studies on a topic are conducted with four negative results and one positive, only the one positive result will make it into the literature, and thereby skewing our knowledge.
Similarly, there is a danger that decision makers don’t hear all the arguments for not doing something, but only hear the argument to do something. Allowing active recommendations to not do something will help reduce this bias.Base important decisions on a portfolio of (short) documents that use different styles, norms and delivery methods
Different writing styles, document formats, or presentation methods can bias people towards making particular decisions. A highly emotional presentation makes a careful weighing of pros and cons hard. Similarly, a dispassionate analytical document undermines any consideration of the emotional dynamics.
As there is no neutral place from which we can make decisions, we cannot hope to find the ‘right’ format to use. Instead, it makes sense to actively bring together different ways of thinking about the issues via different types of documents, different forms of presentation and different writing or thinking styles.
I also wonder whether this dynamic, at a more personal level, partially explains why government prose is so often poor. Good writers almost always talk about needing to find their own voice to be able to write well. The necessary neutrality required in government writing suppresses any such voice.
Excellent exposition. A few thoughts, in case they are helpful.
I see a nuance in the desire for neutrality which reflects your observation that there is no truly independent perspective. Public service writing always takes a perspective, which is usually derived from the responsibilities of the specific agency or an objective set by government. In a sense, public service writing represents a perspective based claim rather than a neutral judgment.
I am not convinced the transition from an oral based tradition of consideration to a written basis is as strong or complete as you suggest. To use a theatre analogy, written documents provide the set on which the decision-making play takes place. They do not provide the script for those decisions. My experience, especially in Cabinet and in Parliament, is that the oral debate and discussion remains the dominant mechanism by which important decisions are made.
If you see the written document as set rather than script, then your second recommendation becomes (arguably) less useful. The key thing is to ensure the actors understand the key dynamics of the decision being taken. Structure and consistency helps this and reduces search costs for those debating a decision.
There is another potential explanation for the quality of government writing (I am referring here to writing for internal decision making purposes). Rather than the problem resting with the norms within it is produced (your four are an excellent capturing of intent) being too constraining, it may be that people are not sufficiently well trained or versed in the techniques of writing for government to meet the norms well.
All that said, I think you are on to something important.