Writing for the person who will disagree

Four years on the other side of the table

I sat on an energy regulator’s appeal panel for four years. Submissions arrived written for a reader who already agreed.

You can see it in the first paragraph. An assumption stated as a finding. The word “clearly” doing the work of a citation. A rejected alternative described in terms its own supporters would not recognise. Those submissions were rarely weak on analysis. They were weak because nobody hostile had read them before they were filed.

Put the rejected option in the words its supporters would use

If you describe the option you rejected in a sentence its advocates would sign, the reader trusts the rest of the document. If you describe it so the choice looks obvious, the reader starts hunting.

The hunt is what costs you. A reader who finds one unfair summary rereads everything with suspicion, including the parts that are sound. Two unfair sentences cost you the credit for everything you did properly.

The words that stand in for evidence

Four phrases do most of this work: “clearly”, “obviously”, “it is widely accepted”, “best practice”.

These cluster where the evidence is thin, and experienced readers use them as a map. Take them out and one of two things happens. The sentence still stands, in which case the word was decoration. Or the sentence falls over, in which case it needed evidence and you have just found out in the right order.

The section that argues against us

Every recommendation we write carries a section on what would make it wrong.

Clients occasionally ask us to cut it, usually before a session where the decision is contested. We do not cut it. That section is what makes the recommendation legible to a reader who comes to the file cold. It also does something useful in the room. A board that can see the conditions under which the advice fails argues about those conditions. That is the productive argument. The alternative is a board that argues about the adviser’s motives.

The disagreement is often inside the board

We once worked with a bank leaving a segment. The risk committee and the strategy committee read the same data and reached opposite conclusions.

Neither had made an error. They were weighting two different risks, and nobody had written the weightings down. So each committee assumed the other was misreading the analysis.

We wrote the two weightings as two sentences, side by side. The disagreement became a choice the board could make in an afternoon. The analysis had not changed at all.

The cheapest hostile reader sits down the corridor

The person who will disagree is the document’s best editor. They are the only one who finds the flaws while there is still time to fix them.

Before a pack goes out, we give it to one of the two who are not on the file. We ask for the strongest case against it. What comes back is uncomfortable and short. It costs less than the same points arriving from a regulator, a court, or a director who decided we were selling rather than advising.