
Lessons from the CIA’s classified guide to good writing - danso
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jul/14/cias-style-guide/
======
OliverJones
My grad school teachers would kick my butt for writing like that. Look at this
lede.

"The trouble with CIA writing is much the same trouble that there is with
other governmental writing and with writing generally in the United States."

How about

"CIA writing baffles our readers. We share this problem with other parts of
government and the United States at large."

Check out this sentence.

"CIA's problem is unique only in the relation of our profession to our writing
but this relation is important, for it lends itself to bad writing and if we
do not write well we risk losing valuable information and wasting dangerous
effort."

WTF? I think this writer means

"At CIA we write about hard-won information. We lose that information and
waste our agency's work when we write badly."

Look, it's easier to be an editor than a writer. Everybody knows that. It's
always easy to cherrypick a sentence or two and make them better.

The point is this: good writing isn't a solitary job; it takes editors as well
as writers. It's like software, which takes coders and testers.

~~~
zmonx
Personally, I think these edits do not preserve the meaning of the original
quotes: The changed sentences stress different things than the original quotes
to the extent that one could call them distortions rather than edits.

From my own experience, I have seen extraordinary writers, but I have never
seen an extraordinary editor: I think the reason for this is that
exceptionally great editors work in such a way that their own edits most
explicitly convey the original work both in its form and in its spirit, so
that the editor becomes almost invisible. Invariably, the more bragging I have
seen from editors in prefaces etc. about their own work on some books, the
worse the result has looked to me in the sense that it had very little to do
with the original, and typically felt worse to me.

I think good editing is _at least as hard_ as good writing, probably even more
so because as an editor, you are working subject to more constraints, _in
addition_ to facing the same challenges that writers also face.

~~~
tkxxx7
On the one hand I agree with you about editing being harder. On the other
hand, and having been an editor in the past, I can that overall it is much
easier. Working within the writer's constraints is usually less difficult than
trying to figure out what the constraints should be in the first place. As an
editor it can actually feel pretty empowering to slash away any final barriers
between the writer's intended message and the audience.

And, yes, good editing is invisible. It's a very good feeling, when you can
discover the author's original mindspace, and hack away at it.

------
jjguy
For many years, I have used "Words of Estimative Probability" \- a similar CIA
"on writing" piece: [https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-
intellig...](https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-
intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/sherman-kent-and-the-board-
of-national-estimates-collected-essays/6words.html)

Also written in the 60s, it reflects upon their experience with how to convey
uncertainty in prose, in a meaningful and consistent manner. Imagine an
analyst writing a two pager for the President, who is going to use it to
decide go/no go on a covert action. It's a big, ugly and complex situation -
with a mixture of highly confident assessments, educated guesses and total
speculation. Synthesizing it into something simpler is The Art of Writing;
doing so while not losing the anecdotal quantification of uncertainty of the
discrete issues is a more unique skill.

If you are in a position where you write about uncertain situations, it's
worth the read. I'm a security guy and frequently find myself in that role
(think annual risk assessments and estimating the likelihood of a successful
attack). It's been a go-to reference for many years to refresh my thinking.

------
Pamar
One of my backburner projects is to check out the declassified CIA documents,
OCR and clean up them, and make these available on my website [1].

The idea was to look for stuff that was interesting as a resoure for role
playing games, mostly, but I also included one about "how to produce
estimates"[2] that is close in spirit to the one about writing.

[1] [http://www.pa-
mar.net/Main/Games/Games/Espionage%20Files.htm...](http://www.pa-
mar.net/Main/Games/Games/Espionage%20Files.html)

[2] [http://www.pa-mar.net/resources/The-evolution-of-some-
techni...](http://www.pa-mar.net/resources/The-evolution-of-some-techniques-
in-the-national-estimating-system.pdf)

~~~
edraferi
USG documents are automatically declassified after 25 years by default. CIA
makes their declassified documents available via the CREST database[1].
Data.World has published the metadata about these documents in a nice
format[2]. Might be worth getting in touch with Noah Ripper to coordinate your
efforts [3]

[1]
[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-
program-archive)

[2] [https://data.world/cia-crest-files/cia-crest-archive-
metadat...](https://data.world/cia-crest-files/cia-crest-archive-
metadata/discuss/cia-crest-archive-metadata/7531)

[3] [https://data.world/nrippner](https://data.world/nrippner)

------
rawland
[https://github.com/reedes/vim-wordy](https://github.com/reedes/vim-wordy)

by @reedes (Reed Esau) is my favorite tool to automatically help me with many
of the mentioned points.

Spell-corrects/warns you about:

    
    
      * Weak and lazy words
      * Redundancies
      * Puffy & Jargon
      * To be and passive voice
      * Colloquialisms, idioms, and similies
      * Lots more..

~~~
ant6n
Is there an emacs version?

------
QAPereo
Or better yet, if you notice that your workplace is starting to resemble the
old, bloated, wildly checkered bureaucracy of the CIA run like hell. This
guide seems less like a style guide in general, and more like an attempt to
flush some nonsense out of the CIA in particular.

> it says that CIA writing is “full of jargon, of would-be professional
> language, of clichés; it is even opaque”

That's what I'd have expected frankly, which is what you'd expect from people
trying to build towers out of sand. If your ideas are lacking, bullshit, and
if bullshit isn't working, obfuscate... that's the alphabet-agency way.

~~~
walshemj
and spelling cliche with an apostrophe isn't ;-)

~~~
joncampbelldev
That is an accent, not an apostrophe

~~~
walshemj
oops my bad

------
daveslash
There is a lot in here that reminds me of the Air Force's _Tongue & Quill_
(public). For example, the CIA's "avoid jargon" section looks eerily similar
to page 82 of T&Q.

[http://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/saf_cio_a6/pu...](http://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/saf_cio_a6/publication/afh33-337/afh33-337.pdf)

------
codyb
I think they're both proper but I feel like it'd be better titled "The CIA's
guide to writing well.".

Just being pedantic though maybe.

~~~
hluska
If I were wearing my editor hat, I'd cross out 'well' and suggest that in that
case it's redundant. "The CIA's Guide to Writing" is just as strong.

~~~
robotresearcher
It's an internal memo, so "The CIA's" is redundant.

Which leaves us with "Guide to Writing". Can we do better?

Stephen King's book on writing is called:

"On Writing".

Nice.

~~~
justin66
As I recall "On Writing" does not have a great deal to say about writing, it's
much more about the life of a writer. To get a pretty good book that is
actually about writing you'd want to upgrade to William Zinsser's "On Writing
Well." So...

~~~
sanityUnbounded
I read the first two sections of On Writing and that was enough for me. The
first is a memoir from Stephen King in which he goes through major events in
his life. The second is a writing style guide which centers around one theme:
simplicity in writing allows for greater imagination in the reader. The second
section goes through sentence structure, syntax, verb/adverb choice, pronoun
placement, ect.

I would agree that the first section does not say a great deal about writing,
but the second section reminded me of sitting in my High School english class
with my favorite teacher writing a couple sentences on the board as an example
and passionately (oops) dissecting the structure with arrows and margin notes
to explain how and why a certain picture was playing in my mind while reading
them.

Placing King's personal anecdotes and thoughts about the "life of a writer"
before the actual lesson felt to me, when I began the second section, like I
was sitting in the classroom of an artist who has far more passion for his
work than I have ever felt for anything in my life before then. It made the
writing lesson more impactful, if anything.

But it certainly had a lot to say about writing.

------
pier25
I'm guessing they also have a coding manual.

Tabs or spaces?

~~~
rawland
Spyces, of course.

~~~
pier25
LOL

------
c3534l
Apart from this being very elementary instructions, I think the bigger story
is that the CIA is abusing its power to classify information so extensively
that simple writing advice was classified for 55 years.

~~~
hyperion2010
While I agree with the idea that the CIA abuses power, techniques that enable
effective communication are a HUGE advantage. Knowing how to write in a way
that other people can actually understand (and take action on) is absolutely
advantageous (as is any other technology that reduces miscommunication). Of
course at this point in time you can take a course like Little Red Schoolhouse
and come away with many, many practical actions you can take to improve the
clarity of your written communication, so probably in effect is has already
been declassified.

~~~
xor1
I can't wait to see the CIA guide to shitposting once it's declassified.

~~~
rfrank
> MEMETICS—A GROWTH INDUSTRY IN US MILITARY OPERATIONS

\- United States Marine Corps, School of Advanced Warfighting

[http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a507172.pdf](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a507172.pdf)

~~~
3131s
I submitted that a few months ago! In general people don't realize the extent
that information warfare is taken seriously in some circles.

------
jaypaulynice
Anyone else noticed 2 spaces after a period and 1 space after a comma in the
writings? I've always done the same, but for some reason 1 space after a
period is correct.

~~~
losteverything
That is how we were trained in typing class.

~~~
jaypaulynice
So 2 spaces only on a typewriter?

------
valbaca
"...these tips will make that next report on regime change into your magnum
opus"

Obligatory "you won't believe #5!"

