Throwback: Military Writing Takes Many Forms
Throwback: Military Writing Takes Many Forms
"Communication is one of life's most important skills"
While at AUSA, I had the good fortune to meet Colonel Dan Sukman, who flagged his great piece from 2016 titled “Military Writing Takes Many Forms.”
In their piece, Sukman and Nate Finney identify seven forms of military writing: the mobile device, the email, the information paper, the strategy, the order, and the speech. Each of these are important forms of communication, and critical aspects of being a military professional.
In the conclusion, they argue that:
Communicating through writing forces the writer to think, and to make intellectual decisions. While professional journals, blogs, and other forms of publication are certainly worthy of time and effort, the daily writing done by officers can be just as, if not more, influential on policy-level decision makers.
However, the Harding Project advocates for renewing professional writing not just for impact on policy-level decisions, but to improve information sharing and idea development across the Army. A healthy system of professional journals shares information and discourse down, up, and laterally, while drawing inspiration from our past and making us better communicators through interaction with editors.
What do you think?
I’m prejudiced with regard to writing as a retired Foreign Service Officer at State where vanity about writing skills was rampant, but I agree that writing is one of the best ways of learning a subject and framing what you think about it. The effort and energy involved in explaining something to others inevitably leaves you understanding it better yourself. One of the best military writers I ever knew was a USMC Major in my seminar group at the Naval War College.
Writing has many purposes: to inform, to direct, to influence, to pursuade, to inspire, to enable, etc. All of these are productive and important at different times. The beauty of writing for publication is the fact that it can reach a broad audience and become available for generations to come (if distributed and archived well).