The whistle-blower gets right to point.

I can’t tell you what’s going to happen to his blockbuster complaint about the president’s behavior, but I can tell you that
the whistle-blower’s college writing instructor would be very proud of him.
As a writing instructor myself for 20 years, I look at the complaint and see a model of clear writing that offers important
lessons for aspiring writers. Here are a few:
The whistle-blower gets right to the point.
We know right away what his purpose is and why we should care. He wastes no time on background or pleasantries
before stating that he is writing to report “an ‘urgent’ concern.” And then he immediately states it:
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the
President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S.
election.”
The whistle-blower uses subheadings to make sure we can connect the dots.
Most subheadings don’t do much to enhance a document. The whistle-blower’s subheadings do what the best
subheadings do: They structure the complaint and provide a clear outline of what the document contains:
I. The 25 July Presidential phone call
II. Efforts to restrict access to records related to the call
III. Ongoing concerns
IV. Circumstances leading up to the 25 July Presidential phone call
The bonus of good subheadings is that they serve as a guide for writing the rest of the document. Even if you’re writing
something less formal, you can use subheadings to organize your document and then remove them before you share it.
The whistle-blower gets an A for his topic sentences.
Strong persuasive or expository writing features topic sentences that tell the reader what to focus on. You can see the
benefit of a good topic sentence in this paragraph from the complaint:
“Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of
pleasantries, the president used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests…..”
With that first sentence, we know that this is going to be a paragraph about how the president used the phone call. And
indeed, the sentences that follow flesh out that picture.
The whistle-blower uses active verbs.
Among other revelations in the complaint, we learn that “the president also praised Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Mr.
Yuriy Lutsenko” and that “senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call.”
Contrast that with versions of those sentences that he could have written, which might read like this: “Ukraine’s
The Whistle-Blower
Knows How to Write
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Prosecutor General was praised” or “all records of the phone call were locked down.”
Passive constructions leave us hanging about who did what, which can be useful if you’re trying to deflect responsibility
for something. But if you want to keep your reader focused on who is accountable for what, tell them by making sure your
sentences feature real people performing actions.
Every semester, I encounter students who tell me variously that they hate writing, that they’d rather not write, that for
the careers they aspire to they won’t need to write. I explain that no matter what careers they choose, they will have to
write — reports, strategic plans, proposals and, if nothing else, many, many emails.
But I also tell them that learning to write matters because some day they may have something to say that really matters
to them and possibly to the world — and they will want to convey it when the moment arrives in writing that’s clear and
concise.
May they never have to blow the whistle. But in case they do, by studying the whistle-blower’s complaint, they’ll be a bit
more prepared to write their own.
Jane Rosenzweig is the director of the Harvard College Writing Center.
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