How to prevent ideas from getting lost in translation

Why doesn’t government innovate more? One possibility is that people with great ideas can’t explain them succinctly to the people in charge of carrying them out.

The problem is so common that three veteran writers about government innovation are trying to address it in a new book called The Little Guide to Writing for Impact. The team of two journalists and one public policy professor want people with research backgrounds to write more clearly, and they offer dozens of practical tips for doing so.

The writing guide offers advice for how to craft pieces—use active voice, vary sentence length, provide evidence, keep pieces close to their targeted length. But it also offers insights into how to pitch pieces to new publications, how to tailor projects for different audiences and how to make editors happy.

The 110-page book is clearly aimed at academics and think tank experts. But Donald F. Kettl, a former dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and one of the book’s authors, told Route Fifty that many government researchers could take the book’s lessons to heart, too.

In government, researchers should be writing for each other and for the public, he said. But they get “caught in the same trap” as their colleagues in universities: using jargon, burying important information and failing to grasp what people outside their field will find most useful.

“They tend to write in government-ese,” said Kettl, who has written or edited 25 books on public policy. “They try to make sure that whatever they write doesn’t get hammered away by the general counsel, who is going to worry that every word can be litigated.”

Being overly cautious and overly insular can mean that an author’s best ideas languish in obscure publications, Kettl said. That’s particularly frustrating because government administrators want to try new approaches.

“I have yet to meet a good and seasoned practitioner who is not always starved for good ideas,” he said. “Invariably, every good administrator is looking for high-powered ideas.”

Kettl joined the husband-and-wife team of Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene, who have covered public policy together for 30 years, including for Route Fifty, where they are currently columnists and senior advisers. (Full disclosure: Journalism is a small world, and I have worked with Barrett and Greene during stints at the Pew Charitable Trusts, Governing magazine and Route Fifty.)

Greene said the idea for the book came from the trio’s experience working with academics. They have edited researchers’ work for publication or interviewed them for their own pieces.

“We were so frustrated, because so often, when you went through these pieces, they had good things to say,” Greene said. “They were smart people with interesting things and powerful ideas, and they were totally incomprehensible.”

“We’ve all been witness to a lot of frustration both from people in academia and in think tanks on one side and from people in government agencies, both state and local, about the lack of ability for each of them to make use of what the other does,” Barrett added. “It’s a lack of communication, because they often speak a different language.”

One of the authors’ biggest concerns was that academics often take too long to get to the point.

“They bury the lede,” Barrett said. “If you’re trying to communicate something to an elected official or a staff person for an elected official—who have a ton of other people trying to persuade them and no time at all—you have to dispense with some of the things that you need to do when you’re communicating with other people in an academic setting.”

Overly long introductions “mask fuzzy thinking,” added Kettl. Researchers and students sometimes discover what their main point is in the process of writing their papers. But by that time, the reader has lost interest. When Kettl told a U.S. senator he was trying to get his students to condense their answers to big problems into two pages, the senator replied, “Ah, I won’t read more than one page.”

To avoid that problem, Kettl said, authors can revise their pieces to put the most salient information first. Or they can think things through first with mental tricks like explaining it to their dog or a trusted aunt.

“Think about what you’re trying to communicate,” he said, “and then figure out how to boil it down and explain it to somebody who may or may not care about the issue, in a way that they’ll pay attention to it.”

Kettl said distilling complex topics is especially important for people in government, who have to review complicated ideas and loads of data and “be able to crystalize it in a way that is true to the data but that is also persuasive in terms of the ideas it presents.”

Academic writers resort to jargon, load down their papers with footnotes and include lots of scientific equations to prove their own intelligence, Kettl said. But that is one reason why so many academic papers are only read by a handful of people. “That’s not the way to have an impact on your field,” he said. “The way to have impact is to have other academics read your writing.”

“If you’re writing in an ivory tower,” Greene added, “you want to make sure the ivory tower has lots of doors and lots of windows.”