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Nobody reads a ten-page paper
Writing for the White House
After 9/11, William McRaven served on the National Security Council staff in the Bush administration and wrote papers every day for National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and for President Bush. The skill behind it came from journalism, and especially from sports writers: a baseball game has nine innings and a football game has four quarters, and the writer still has to hit the highlights that matter to the reader.
Briefing a president
He had used it before, writing point papers as a naval officer on the Pentagon staff in 1986. Later, briefing Presidents Bush and Obama on a complex mission, he couldn't walk through every intricacy. A president needs the risks, how certain the intelligence is, and the most important points, framed so they resonate, so a decision can be made and the answer can come back.
Training the skill at home
Some families train the same muscle at home. At dinner parties, anyone can be called on to give a five-minute speech on a topic they have just spent 120 or 200 hours on. In the Oxbridge tutorial model, students write a ten-page paper and then summarize it for a tutor and three classmates, in four minutes or maybe forty.
Why does writing short take longer?
The French mathematician and writer Blaise Pascal wrote in 1657 that he had made a letter longer than usual because he lacked the time to make it shorter. Cutting a text forces the writer to decide what matters most and discard the rest, and each of those decisions takes effort that a long draft avoids. The remark appears in the sixteenth of his Provincial Letters.
How did newspapers settle on the inverted pyramid?
Journalism historians often trace the form to Civil War telegraph reporting, when lines could fail mid-message, so reporters sent the key facts first. Historians disagree on exactly when it became standard. The form also suited editors, who could cut a story from the bottom to fit the page without losing the main facts. It was widespread in American newspapers by the early twentieth century.
How do Oxford tutorials train summarizing?
At Oxford, a tutorial is a weekly meeting in which one to three students and a tutor discuss an essay the student has written that week. Students typically read their essay aloud or defend its argument, and the tutor questions them on it. The tutorial system grew out of the college structure of the university and has run in some form for centuries. Cambridge runs a similar small-group teaching called supervisions.
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