One of the primary reasons why many policy analysts struggle to write clearly and concisely is that they don’t have clarity about whom they’re writing for. Before you analyze your data, you’ve got to get a clear understanding of who your reader is, what they want to achieve, and how you can help them achieve it. To figure out what your reader needs, you can ask yourself six questions—the answers to which will help you know what research questions to ask, what kinds of data to collect and analyze, and how to communicate the results of your analysis in an interesting and persuasive way.
1. What are the reader’s goals?
This is a really important question—perhaps the most important. Think about it this way: What does your reader need to know to help them achieve their goals and accomplish their mission? If you want your writing to be valuable to your reader, you need to position what you write as a helpful tool the reader can use to get what they want.
For example, imagine you’re a policy analyst working for a politician who needs to decide whether to support a new bill or oppose it. The question we must ask ourselves is, What information does this person need to make an informed decision? One goal of politicians, of course, is—or should be—to do what’s right for their constituents. But they may also need to factor in how different special interests may respond to their vote and how donors may feel about it. At the end of the day, most politicians want to stay in office. That’s their primary goal. And to stay in office, they need money, which can be harder to get if you annoy the people who have a lot of it.
That’s not to say, though, that there’s no way to persuade a politician to take a stand unpopular with moneyed interests. Plenty of politicians at the national level in the United States have declared they will no longer take donations from lobbyists and political action campaigns. Still, that doesn’t change the fact they need money, so one goal of these politicians may be to energize the base of small donors who can give them enough money to stay in office. In any event, if you the policy analyst do not account for the reader’s interests and goals in your analysis and recommendations, I highly doubt you are going to persuade them.
2. What does the reader already know?
If you’re writing for a reader with expertise in your subject area, you won’t need to spend a lot of time explaining the background of an issue or the history of a policy challenge. No reader wants to commission a report that’s full of information they already know. On the other hand, if you’re writing for a reader with little experience in your topic area and little understanding of statistics, you must spend more time catching them up on the topic and explaining how you arrived at your conclusions from your data analysis.
Keep in mind, though, that even seemingly simple information may be difficult to process since many Americans are not “proficiently literate.” In 2017, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that 51 percent of American adults (aged 16–65 years) scored “below proficient” on a literacy test that measured their ability to “understand, use, and respond appropriately” to written documents. The study, conducted by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, was designed to assess nationally representative samples of people from 38 countries around the world on a broad range of abilities needed to succeed in the twenty-first-century economy. The average score for US participants—on a scale of 0–500—was 272, only five points above the international average. The average adult in Japan scored 296, the highest score of any country.
Our reader’s literacy, numeracy, and digital problem-solving skills are further complicated by the ways the human brain processes information. Our brains have two systems of thinking—known as System 1 and System 2 in the parlance of Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman—and these two systems fight for control of our thoughts and behaviors. System 1 operates automatically and involuntarily. System 2 operates consciously. Because all human brains are inherently lazy, in that they want to conserve energy, we rely on System 1 whenever we face a relatively simple problem because System 1 is more energy efficient. When we are confronted with a more difficult or novel problem, however, System 1 generally calls on System 2 to analyze the available evidence and arrive at a logical conclusion. Sometimes, though, our brains do not accurately perceive how difficult a problem is, and we place too much trust in System 1 to solve it.
This becomes a problem when System 1 activates assumptions or biases that are inaccurate or irrelevant. Take, for example, a phenomenon known as cognitive ease, which happens because things that are quicker to decipher or more familiar to us also seem truer to us than things that are more difficult to interpret or unusual. Another bias that policy analysts need to be aware of is confirmation bias, which describes the human tendency to search for and find confirming evidence for a preexisting belief while simultaneously overlooking examples that refute it.
3. What keeps your reader up at night?
What is your reader afraid of? What challenges may they be facing that they’re not being forthright about? One way to find out is to ask them such questions. Another way to approach this is to read the stories your reader tells about themselves and compare those to the stories the popular press and various think tanks write about them.
4. What’s been tried in the past? How did it work out?
Just because something has been tried in the past doesn’t mean that it can’t be tried again. Political circumstances change. Public opinion changes. Factors on the ground change. Policy analysts need to know how we got here, what’s been tried before, what happened, why it happened that way, and whether anything different about the circumstances today might lead to a different outcome.
5. How averse to risk is your reader?
If you’re writing for a reader that is more innovative—think Silicon Valley’s “fail fast and break things” mentality—where risk is viewed as necessary and desirable, you can probably feel more comfortable making policy recommendations that are a little riskier. If, on the other hand, you’re writing for a governmental organization or a nonprofit that abhors risk, then you must make recommendations suited to caution.
What if you want to recommend something important but risky, yet you’re convinced your reader won’t be up for doing the right thing because it’s too hard? Some things, of course, are worth taking a chance on. Just be prepared for extra work. If, for example, you want to recommend that a risk-averse reader do something risky, then you’ve got to tell them an interesting and persuasive story that gives them what they need to take that leap of faith.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you might not have a totally clear picture of your reader’s level of risk aversion. They may tell you they are less averse to risk than they really are. Or they may seem averse because they haven’t yet found the right thing to take a risk on. This too is part of the analyst’s job—if you want to write something that matters.
6. What barriers does your reader face?
You can write an incredibly persuasive report based on robust data and impressive analysis, but if there is some challenge or barrier that will stop the reader from listening and taking the steps you suggest, then you are probably wasting your time and theirs. You absolutely must know if there is anything that can stand in your reader’s way.
Sometimes it can feel like there are nothing but barriers, that no matter what you say, the reader isn’t going to listen. And if they do listen, they certainly won’t act. Just remember that when you’re contributing a policy narrative to the conversation on some topic, you’re not only communicating with the powers that be. You’re also communicating, potentially, with your peers and those who are following the conversation, waiting to decide what they think about it. You might be, in other words, laying the groundwork for something special—even if it doesn’t feel like it—with every word you write.