Translated: Four Paragraphs and What They Actually Say

This is a composite. I have written enough of these that I can build one out of parts without going anywhere near an actual document, and the shape is always the same.

Paragraph one is weather. It describes the market, or the year, or the pace of change, in sentences nobody could disagree with. Its function is to establish that what follows is a response to conditions rather than a decision made by people with names.

Paragraph two is the org chart, phrased as a philosophy. Words like aligned and streamlined are doing structural work here: they are the load-bearing terms and they are the ones with no referent.

Paragraph three thanks somebody, in the past tense, which is where you find out who has gone. And paragraph four, four hundred words in, tells you what is happening and when. Both facts are there. They have simply been placed where a reader who has already skimmed will not reach them.

I have started doing this as a matter of routine and it works on roughly nine out of ten of them.

The last paragraph is what happened. The one before it is who it happened to. The one before that is the justification, and the first paragraph is the weather, which was written last and takes the longest.

This is not a conspiracy and I want to keep saying that, because the cynical version of this paper is much less useful than the accurate one. Nobody sits down to obscure. What happens is that the decision is made, and then it is circulated for comment, and every person who touches it adds a sentence at the top that makes them more comfortable.

The memo grows upward. That is the whole mechanism. If you want to know what a document says, read it in the order it accumulated rather than the order it is printed in.

It opened with what was happening. Second sentence, when. Third sentence, who to ask. Then four sentences on why, which were arguable and which the writer clearly knew were arguable, and then it stopped.

No weather. No philosophy. Nobody thanked in the past tense.

The reaction inside the building was interesting and not what I would have predicted. People did not say it was refreshingly direct. Several said it was cold, and two people read it as worse news than it was, precisely because the absence of cushioning registered as bad news in itself.

Which is the depressing finding of this paper's first year. The padding is not only there to protect the writer. Enough of us are now fluent in the padded version that removing it changes the meaning, and the person who writes the ninety-word memo gets punished for it.

This is the exercise I recommend to anybody who wants to read these properly, and it takes an afternoon and it is free.

Pick one word that appears in your organisation's documents and does no obvious work. Find every use of it you can and write down, next to each, what actually happened afterwards.

Mine meant a merger of two teams, then a hiring freeze, then a tooling change, then twice a genuine simplification that people were pleased about, then a redundancy, then three things I could not trace to any outcome at all.

The point of the exercise is not the cynical conclusion. It is that after an afternoon you stop reading the word as a claim and start reading it as a slot, and you notice that the sentence containing it is doing no work either. That is a skill and it takes one afternoon, and it is the closest thing to a method this paper has ever had.