There is no "I" in "Memo"

When you can write reasonably well, you often find yourself in some demand at work, at least if you work in an office-type environment. It would seem (editorial comment warning) that our educational system's focus in recent years on science and engineering at the expense of the arts has resulted in a world where the ability to string words together intelligently, logically, clearly and with some panache is becoming more and more rare.


So I am constantly being asked to review this memo, revise that letter, write an article for the newsletter or "take a look at" whatever document might be passing through the hands of my colleagues and supervisors. As a result, I've been faced with some interesting writing challenges, the most common of which being the task of finding a way to completely rewrite a boss' unintelligible gibberish without upsetting him or her or making him or her feel stupid.


My worst experience came when a very petulant supervisor brought me an extended document, told me it had been written by some other person and asked me to rewrite it on an emergency basis. I went right to work on it and, let me tell you, it was indeed a disaster: unclear, poorly argued, poorly structured and with numerous grammatical and spelling errors. When my supervisor came back 30 minutes later and saw the document bleeding the red of "Track Changes" on my screen, he freaked out. It turned out he had written the document himself and had given it to me thinking it just needed a minor refresh. My relationship with that supervisor was never the same and I eventually had to leave that job to escape his vindictive behaviour.


My most interesting and, honestly, most fun experience came just last week. Friday afternoon, 15 minutes before the end of the work day, my supervisor came to me with a memo he had written on behalf of his boss' new boss. The memo was quite well written -- it was intended to introduce the boss' new boss to her colleagues and did a nice job of it -- but the boss' new boss had apparently objected to the use of the word "I" in the memo. Apparently, this particular senior administrator does not like to use the first person singular pronoun in memos of any kind.


My task: in the remaining 15 minutes of the work week, could I revise the four-paragraph memo so that the word "I" no longer appeared in it and yet it still did its job and made sense?


Do you know how hard it is to write a memo introducing oneself without using the first person singular pronoun? It's hard, let me tell you.


I ended up using a number of "it"s, a couple of "me"s and a bunch of alternative sentence structures that permitted me to make anything but the boss' new boss the subject of a sentence. And I got it done. In ten minutes. I was pretty proud of myself. The memo read well and only a very attentive reader would notice the lengths I went to avoid using the word "I".


My supervisor and his boss agreed that, as a result of the great job I had done on this memo, I deserved the rest of the day off. Nice guys, my bosses!

On researching, writing and revising

These are challenging times. For me as a writer, that is.


Not only am I in the middle of some very intense research for my next novel (a historical novel for the young-adult audience), I am also revising several Abigail stories of my own, working with a fellow writer on her early draft stories, incorporating readers' suggestions into my draft play and starting to work on the novel itself.


And also writing blogs and doing a great deal of writing at work.


Yes, busy, interesting and challenging times, for sure.


The research, I love, and I am finding that the internet is really coming into its own as a research tool. As recently as five years ago, I would be bemoaning how limited online resources actually are on certain issues but now I am impressed. I've been able to find, for example, daily weather reports for London from 1940.


Of course, the more factual details you can find about a historical period, the more pressure there is on you to ensure that your fictional writing reflects those details. It's fun but challenging.


The revision (of stories and plays) is also very interesting. Unfortunately, I am a writer who enjoys hammering out the original draft a lot more than I enjoy the revise-and-rewrite process. So I have to force myself to focus on the task of improving on the original and one way I do that is by having excellent readers review and make suggestions on my drafts.


When the feedback is so strong and on-point that you wish you had thought of it yourself, it's a lot easier to decide to incorporate it into your work.


Working with other writers on their work is also a fun challenge. I hope I can be as good a reader and as diplomatic a purveyor of feedback for others as my own readers are for me. I always try to start with the positive and to make constructive suggestions on the ways I think the writing can be improved. But I also feel very strongly that giving feedback on someone's writing is not just about focusing on the detail -- you have to be willing to raise issues of structure, of tone, of point of view even.


It's a lot of work to keep up with all these different paths in my writing career. But very rewarding too.