Praise for Everyday Writing and the Memo

According to a certain notion about poets—I don’t know whether to call it a stereotype, a romanticized idea, or a sometimes-accurate description—their sensitive natures register more of life’s meaning than those blunter instruments of observation we think of as unpoetic people. This notion about poets extends to other creators: painters, filmmakers, novelists, musicians—you get the idea. It elevates the sensibilities of this class above the rest of humanity.

The passionate admiration people feel for all kinds of artists, however, seems to suggest an alternative truth: lots and lots of people possess enormous understanding and interest in the grand subject of life, causing a large number of them to be grateful when others manage to capture some of it in all those shareable artistic formats.

The beautiful, striving souls of ordinary people just manifest in more mundane ways. In deeds. In sacrifice. In wicked humor and the offhand, pithy pronouncement. In utilitarian writing, and yes: the lowly memorandum.

To appreciate this, don’t think about a really bad memo. Transition by calling to mind a terrible poem, and after that, a well-crafted memo.

The site of much workaday struggle, a good memo strives to inform, plan, persuade, and enlist. Within an organization, it constructs the effective persona of its writer. When it’s off the mark, it induces eye-rolling, indifference, misunderstanding, or offense. Pursuing goals despite skepticism or resistance, the memo-writer becomes a small-time politician working through the corporate laptop and like Franklin Delano Roosevelt can sometimes say, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.”

For me, writing memos as a professor and administrator offered an unexpected crucible for discovering more control as a writer.

Before I wrote 10,000 memos, I thought of my writing as emerging from a deep, internal process. Gradually memos made writing the corridors of my interaction with others, too.

I was literary, as in sensitive, at a young age, but not as finely attuned to the life of my words beyond me. That needed to be developed and earned. A hard-packed, inward person, I needed an audience to become part of my daily life over a span of time to develop greater patience, process, and confidence in relation to readers. I needed to “publish” for students, committees, and departments to learn how to revise with a full, proactive spirit.

In graduate school, I developed intellectual resources by reading literature, criticism, and theory. Writing a dissertation gave me the invaluable experience of working on a big project in smaller pieces over a long time. Subsequently, my career as an English professor kept me in constant company with literature. Still, I could not have reached the point of writing a novel without the practice of revising all those memos.

Learning to write documents other than fiction and poems really well--and this always means learning to revise really well--also develops depth and sensitivity. Think of it as cross-training. Workplaces promise a struggle to find standing and challenge writers to discover who they can become on the pathways their own words create.