Writing: Purposeful Communication

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” *
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Communicative writing is simple, clear, elegant, and engaging, typically prioritized in that order. Unfortunately, entertainment writing — from Shakespeare to Rowling — is the basis of how students are taught to think about writing. That high school students produce pretentious-sounding gibberish (“Shakespearean!”) that goes on for pages without going anywhere (“Rowling-esque!”) should thus come as no surprise. What will come as a surprise to you (as it did to me) is that “if you write like a high school student in university, your lecturer will probably tell you that you took too long to get to the point and included too much irrelevant information” (Mewburn, 2021, p. 6). I do not want this to happen to you. With this in mind, I am producing a small set of articles on how to write for communication.

What is Communicative Writing?

Communicative writing is directed from its author towards an audience with an intention to educate, inform, persuade, inspire, or transform them. Pausing to consider this definition: every essay you have turned in has been written for your teacher (your audience) to inform or persuade them that you understood the material they were presenting (your intent). This should present ample opportunity for practicing communicative writing, but there are corruptive elements making things difficult.

Misdirections

From a young age you learn that people with power and authority use words you do not understand: priests use Latin, wizards invoke arcane terms, adults discuss “the economy.” In order to gain access to adult power and authority, you mimic their use of unfamiliar words well enough for adults to hold you in higher regard than your peers. In aggregate, clever students can reasonably believe that they will be rewarded for not knowing what they are talking about if they can adequately obfuscate their ignorance with non-communicative language — and then make a career of this behavior in Management Consulting and perhaps going to therapy sessions where they try to unpack their impostor syndrome.

Additionally, you were likely taught to use writing as a means of self-expression. In this formulation, you do not have an audience beyond yourself, nor a clear intention. As David Coleman explained while promoting the Common Core, this is ineffective because “as you grow up in this world, you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think” (Wexler, 2019, p. 230). At this foundational level, writing for self-expression is an unsuitable practice for communicative writing. While it is true that writing for self-expression can help you disgorge your thoughts and discover therein your specific intention for communicative writing, the processes are different enough to invoke Brooks’s advice on planning: “plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow” (1995, p. 101). Once you identify a viable intention that surfaces in unstructured writing, it is entirely reasonable to start over, building an intention-driven outline on fresh ground (Wexler, 2019).

Reorientation

Ideally, before a college professor scolds you for writing like a child, you will realize that being given topical prompts and impossibly restrictive word-limits is intended to refine your responses down from rambling expressiveness to a clear answer that is fit to purpose. I am writing this so that (intent) you (audience) will have this paradigm-shift clearly revealed to you.

Again, communicative writing starts from its purpose: the intended effect on the audience. Its content needs to stay focused on its purpose. It needs to be easily understood (both the words and the structure) and trusted as authentic. Its tone should be engaging and aesthetically pleasing to consume. People who learn the writing style of journalism — or corporate communication to produce press releases for journalists, as I did — will learn this from chronically-disappointed editors. But for academic purposes these objectives transform into: “make the reader’s job easier, follow the grading rubric, have a stronger argument style than your peer group, deliver on the premise, and remember that the grade is not a reward but a seal of approval to continue” (Mewburn, 2021, pp. 10-11).

Getting Started

The simplest test of being ready to write with purpose, however, is being able to put a Bottom Line Up Front or Too Long, Didn’t Read summary of what you want your audience to get even if their goldfishesque lack of focus causes them to abandon your writing after 12 seconds. 🐟⏰📝

As noted, you may need to work through some self-expressive writing to shake out viable ideas that will turn into your BLUF and then, cleansed of the stickiness of your less-relevant thoughts, you will develop those into your communicative writing.

The BLUF can be daunting: it is common practice — at least for neurotypicals — to introduce yourself before infodumping on somebody. But journalists routinely rack up at least the who, what, when, and where within the first sentence of an article. Similarly, “academic writing is not a murder mystery: we want to know who is guilty in the first paragraph” (Mewburn, 2021, p. 14). Putting your conclusion in the lead position establishes your pledge of what you intend to communicate to your audience and should keep you focused on fulfilling that pledge. This is true even if your edit out your specific BLUF later in your process as a matter of style.

About That Personal Statement

If this seems wildly unhelpful for writing a personal statement to send into a college, consider this:

Your audience will be the admissions readers at the university you’re applying to, and your intent is to persuade them that you are a virtuous person who they should desire to include in the cohort they are assembling. Clarifying your purpose down from that abstract position requires a bit of research into the particulars of your selected university (I help my paying clients with this) and a lot of introspection regarding how you demonstrate your particular qualities to the world (that you hopefully started ruminating on at least 3 minutes ago). Doing the contemplative work to align yourself to your audience should give your particular personal statement its specific purpose.

This perhaps sounds like it contradicts Zinsser’s axiom of “If you write for yourself, you’ll reach the people you want to write for” (2021, p. 134) but it instead serves as a corollary: if you treat the admissions readers as a mysterious Other that you must impress, enchant, and beguile by seeming like somebody far more amazing than yourself (see also: Hartley, 1986), then you—the actual day-to-day you—will not be a good fit for the institution the readers are gatekeeping for. Beyond writing your personal statement, you have to have confidence that you belong at each/any of the places you are applying to.

And once you are focused on writing to that purpose, you are less likely to get stuck in the sensory mud of aesthetic description as unguided students routinely do and instead focus on the choices and actions that show who you are.

Optional Bonus Tangent from Misdirection

Chapter 4 of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (2011) is about orientation, generally the designations of what is up versus down. They claim “We do not know very much about the experiential bases of metaphors” (p. 19) but this is because they are only thinking of adult experience, not the dozen formulative and language-acquiring years of life when the small-statured child is looking up at the adult(s) who will personify “up-ness” in the child’s future. Citing their examples of orientation metaphors: high status is up, rational is up, consciousness is up, control is up, implicitly self-discipline is also up, and virtue is up, with all of this being what is expected of the grown-ups though Lakoff and Johnson claim to be baffled by it.

Thus the underdeveloped (child) is expected to engage in aspirational mimicry until they align to the social norm (adult), and we see this pattern repeated elsewhere: moral systems cultivated “by and for the privileged classes, [are] spread through the entire social body” through the aspirations of the unprivileged, and where the spread is too slow “there was [or will be] a great campaign for the ‘moralization of the poorer classes'” (Foucault, 1990, p. 123). And we socially accept this because the power-function of normalization is to “qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize” (Foucault, 1990, p. 144) subjects against the preferred behaviors, habits, or customs of a people that are its common definition of morality.

Thus the aspirational mimicking of an adult vocabulary is considered moral and praiseworthy, even if neither you nor anybody around you genuinely understands what you are saying.

* Before we are done with misdirections: Steve Almond (2024) spent the chapter “A Wrinkle in Time: How to Manage Chronology” demonstrating preferable alternatives to this simplistically linear advice.

References

Almond, S. (2024). Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories (1st ed). Zando.

Brooks, F. P. (1995). The mythical man-month: Essays on software engineering (Ed. d’anniversaire). Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction. Reissue. Vintage.

Hartley, R. (1986). “Imagine You’re Clever.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 27: 383-398. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1986.tb01840.x

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2011). Metaphors we live by: With a new afterword (6. print). Univ. of Chicago Press.

Mewburn, I. (with Firth, Firth, K., & Lehmann, S.). (2021). Level up Your Essays: How to Get Better Grades at University. NewSouth Publishing.

Wexler, N. (2019). The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–And How to Fix It. Penguin Publishing Group.

Zinsser, W. (2021). On writing well: The classical guide to writing nonfiction (Seventh edition, revised and updated, 30th anniversary edition). Collins.