We are Not Islands – the Importance of Describing Life Context

If you aren’t careful in your writing, most American readers will read it through the lens of our individualistic culture, the over-simplified paradigm that individuals alone are responsible for what we make of our lives. This predominant paradigm doesn’t take into account the social systems that give some people fewer choices, resources, and opportunities, as well as more risks, barriers to success, stress, health issues, and trauma.

People from oppressed groups are far more likely to have grown up aware of the truth – that people’s lives are shaped by how other people and social systems treat them, by what choices this context and their natures give them in response, and only then by what choices they make. Still, chances are that your readers will have the individualistic view to some degree programmed into their thinking by our culture, even if they have been working to reprogram it in themselves, and especially if they have had access to privilege. It is therefore important for mission-based writing to explicitly describe the systems that shape people’s lives. In addition to helping organizations address the barriers caused by these systems, this makes a critical difference to readers in the following three ways:

1. It Helps Shift Culture to Address Systemic Injustice

One of the first steps for addressing systemic injustice is to get it out in the open and develop a culture where we all explicitly acknowledge and talk about it. That means making a regular practice of intentionally countering the dominant individualistic paradigm. The more of us do this, and the more often we do it, the more thoroughly we will reprogram our own thinking, help others reprogram theirs, and influence others to continue explicitly contextualizing people’s lives within systems of oppression or privilege. Helping to make this thinking common practice helps shift US culture to a more accurate view that factors in both what is in an individual’s control and what is not. This culture change is necessary for both addressing the harms of injustice and ultimately eliminating it, and we are all responsible for being part of this change.

2. It Helps Shift Culture to Stop Blaming People for the Impacts of their Oppression

Describing life context fosters compassion by enabling people to imagine themselves in the other person’s shoes and not judge them. For example, many people would judge a woman described as a high school dropout who has not been able to hold down a job, has three children by three different men who are not helping at all, and is struggling to get by on Welfare. But what if they knew that her mother struggled with addiction and due to racial bias, was sent to jail instead of rehab, and she was placed in foster care, where she was never left in the same place more than a few months before being moved again, so she developed a “tough girl” persona, and her life was peppered with racist microaggressions from foster parents, teachers, and social workers who didn’t think she’d amount to much? It’s no surprise then that she wasn’t motivated in school, and her need to be accepted, coupled with her lack of access to birth control, led to pregnancy by the age of 14. Stories like this are not uncommon, and once we unpack all the oppression so many people are up against, we can eradicate the trend of blaming them and instead admire their resilience, offer them support, and work to change the systems that are truly to blame for their situations.

3. It Portrays the Context and Impact of Your Work

Showing what the people you work with are up against makes the importance and difficulty of your work crystal clear, and it shows how deeply people can improve their lives by participating in your programming, or what a deep difference the systemic changes you strive for or achieve will make.

This draws donors and funders to support you and makes constituents feel more comfortable receiving your help, since they know you won’t blame them or look down on them in pity. It also helps donors and funders adjust their expectations. For instance, it could show them that if you are working with people struggling for survival amidst oppression, you cannot be expected to quickly solve all of their problems or mold them all into organizing leaders – but what you can do is invaluable.

Writing with Confidence that’s Contagious to Your Reader

How confident should mission-based writing be? You need to make your reader feel confident in your work and in you, even when you may be writing about things you are unsure of, like what you can do with funding you’re not at all sure you will be awarded. How do you balance your fear of over-promising with the need to promise enough to entice participation and support? Does it sound like vain assumption to write like you are sure your work will be funded, or does it sound insecure to write like you’re not sure? If you come off either too insecure or too vain, then no matter how well you demonstrate the merits of your work, you will turn people off and won’t be successful.

Let’s start by thinking about what it looks like to write too humbly. How many words or phrases do you see in the example below that express uncertainty?

Birch Park is just a small wildlife refuge with a few educational programs, but we believe that if you decide to fund us, we should be able to maintain our paths and clean up litter every week or so. We will also try to start keeping records of some of the species in the park, so that we might be able to tell if their populations decline, and then see if we can help them.

Click to page 2 below to see the answer and keep reading the article.

How Do You Want Your Readers to Feel?
The 4 C’s

To be successful in your mission-based writing, you must carefully consider how you want your readers to feel. Most of the time, you are aiming to elicit four different responses simultaneously, which I call the four C’s. Miss any one of them, and you will not get the results you want.

How You Want to Make Readers Feel: the 4 C’s

• Concerned about the problem
• Compassionate toward the constituents (including themselves, if you are trying to engage them in services)
• Confident in your ability to address the problem
• Captivated by your story of real or potential impact, so they will remember you

 

A helpful exercise is to take a piece of writing and assess how well it addresses the 4 C’s.

Here is an example from a need statement that has major problems with all 4 C’s:

There is little that can be done to stop the arts from disappearing from schools, and economically disadvantaged families usually cannot afford the time or money to go to museums, performances, or art classes. Many low income people do not appreciate the arts, so it is a challenge to fill our programs. Those who do attend usually come only once. Still, Silver Arts Center continues to offer exhibits, performances, and art classes, hoping that through us, at least some of the urban underprivileged will become involved in the arts.

How Does it Address the 4 C’s?

• Concerned: The passage talks about the arts disappearing without discussing the value of what is dying out. It depicts people with low incomes as not being interested in the arts and does not show how they are missing out on something that would be of value to them. The issue also sounds more depressing than concerning. When concerned, people are motivated to want a solution to a problem; when depressed, we just feel down about it. This passage makes the situation appear so hopeless that the reader just wants to move on to something else and not think about this seemingly unsolvable problem.
• Compassionate: The passage paints the constituents as ignorant, unappreciative, uncultured, and inferior to those working at the arts center. This judgmental attitude blocks compassion for the constituents – or leads readers to feel compassion for their plight in having to deal with such a judgmental, superior nonprofit, rather than feeling compassion for their lack of access to the arts.
• Confident: While the passage shows the nonprofit’s superior attitude, it does not make the reader feel at all confident in the organization’s ability to do their work. On the contrary, the classicism it exhibits shows a huge obstacles to successful engagement of the constituents. It also explicitly states that the arts center has trouble filling their programs and getting repeat attendees, and the reader suspects this may have more to do with the organization’s classicism than with the constituents’ lack of appreciation for the arts.
• Captivated: Far from being captivated by this organization’s story or impact, the reader is left either wanting to forget what was written, or remembering it only because its classicism sparks a sense of righteous indignation against the organization.

 

In contrast, here is an example that describes the same arts center using the four C’s:

Our schools are giving away their pianos and replacing their walls of student watercolors with walls of standardized test scores. The arts are being erased from schools, and families with low incomes have difficulty affording museums, performances, or art classes. People struggling to make a living without access to the arts often do not even have a chance to learn the value creative pursuits could add to their lives. At Silver Arts Center, we believe that creative expression is a vital part of human life and should be available to all, so we offer free exhibits, performances, and art classes in the bustling heart of downtown. We highlight local talent and locally relevant topics, stimulating the art lover – and the artist – innate in each person.

 

How Does it Address the 4 C’s?

• Concerned: The passage discusses the value of the arts and paints a picture of what it means for students and adults with low incomes to live without them. It makes the problem sound solvable through the organization’s work.
• Compassionate: The passage describes the constituents in a way that anyone could relate to; instead of judging them for not appreciating the arts, it shows how their circumstances prevent them from even getting to see what they are missing. It paints the constituents as no different than the writer or the reader, except for their situation. It affirms the artist in every person and makes the reader feel for constituents and want them to have access to the arts.
• Confident: The passage makes the arts center sound like they are part of the community, responsive to the community’s needs, and genuinely appreciative of and connected to the people they serve.
• Captivated: The organization sounds inspiring and warm. The passage makes the reader imagine how the arts center must be filled with struggling people who have found that its classes uplift them and transform their lives through enabling them to discover the joy of creating art.

 

While these examples are extreme, you may find on examination that your writing is strong on two or three of the C’s, but omits or is weak on the other one or two. Make sure it is strong in all four, and your readers will respond.

Mission-Based Writing as Creative Writing

Many people see grant writing and copywriting as necessarily dry and boring, but they’re actually most effective if you use your creative writing skills. The more you can bring your work to life, the more persuasive and memorable your writing will be. And one of the best ways to bring your work to life is to use sensory language that makes readers imagine what it looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels like.

Here’s an example of a purely factual description:

Suzie’s House provides beds, meals, and fun activities for youth experiencing homelessness. We have adult mentors facilitate the group activities, and the youth and mentors cook and eat all meals together. We even have a foosball table.

And here’s another description that’s about the same length, but feels completely different:

Suzie’s House finds youth sleeping on hard park benches in the cold, and brings them inside for cozy beds, foosball, and laughter. Youth and adult mentors connect while cooking and eating favorite meals together, such as pizza and spaghetti.

 

Try looking at your writing and thinking of where you can add sensory details that will make your readers imagine the challenges you address, how wonderful it feels to participate in your work, and how much better life can be afterward.

 

There’s Not Enough Room! 6 Tips to Edit Shorter Without Cutting Content

Ever notice how it’s often harder and more time-consuming to write something short than to write something long? When you’re not worried about length, you can just say everything you want to, but when space is limited, you have to edit over and over to say it all in less space. Whether you’re agonizing over how to fit into word or character counts in a grant proposal, make your one-pager really one page, or write website copy short enough that visitors will actually read it, here are 6 tips to cut length without cutting content.

1. Orient yourself to the type of length limit you have

• Character Counts – Your goal is to use fewer and shorter words and fewer punctuation marks.
• Word Counts – Your goal is to use fewer words, which could mean using some longer words and increasing the character count; you don’t need to worry about punctuation.
• Space Constraints – Your goal is to cut the number of lines, which can mean cutting words or characters from one line, so you can bring up words from a line below and ultimately cut a line. This can also mean reordering words to place longer ones on a line that does not go all the way to end, so you can shorten the line below and eliminate the line below that.

 

2. Switch to shorter or fewer words and phrases that convey the same meaning.

Original sentence:

Many families do not make enough income to always feel confident that they will not find their cupboards bare and their wallets empty when their next paycheck is still days away from arriving.

208 characters, 33 words, 3 lines

Shortened by using fewer and shorter words:

Many families with low incomes live in fear of running out of food and the money to buy more.

94 characters, 19 words, 1 line

Shortened to use fewer words only. This version uses fewer words, but more characters and lines.

Many families with low incomes continually fear running out of both food and money for buying more.

99 characters, 17 words, 2 lines

 

3. Restructure sentences to remove less meaningful words.

Often, the first way you write a sentence is not the shortest way it could be written. Think about how you could restructure or reorder the sentence to remove conjunctions, linking words, forms of the verb “to be,” and/or or repetition.

Original Sentence:

To mitigate hunger in our area, our program provides services to people who are facing food insecurity; these services are free and include giving people food and information about nutrition, as well as providing them with referrals to other services that can help them to meet their basic needs.

297 characters, 49 words, 4 lines

Shortened by cutting unnecessary words:

Our program mitigates local hunger by serving people facing food insecurity with free food, nutrition information, and referrals to other basic needs services.

159 characters, 23 words, 2 lines

 

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How Mission-Based Writing is Like Dating

Think of a time when you were infatuated with someone, and you wanted to get them to like you, connect with them, and see if you could get a relationship going. That’s actually what you’re always trying to do in mission-based writing. Whether your goal is to persuade a foundation to fund your work, a donor or volunteer to contribute, or a potential client to come receive services, what you’re really trying to do is build a relationship, so it can help to apply commonsense dating tips to your writing.

Here are a few common sense tips to follow if you want to get a relationship going with someone new, whether in dating or in mission-based writing.

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Three Crucial Tips for Writing About
Your Participants

Even when your heart is in the right place, it is all too easy to write about the participants of your work in a way that subtly disempowers or dishonors them. Here are three important considerations to make sure you avoid this faux pas.

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How to Bring Your Work to Life with Participants’ Stories

Whether you are seeking new clients, participants, donors, funders, or volunteers, you need your writing to bring your work vividly to life so they will imagine what it is like and want to receive it or help you provide it. Quotations and stories are the best way to illustrate what your work truly feels like to real people … but only if you use them effectively.

The last Flight Log explored what makes a quotation strong, how to fit them when you have very little space to work with, and how to collect good ones. Now let’s talk about how to effectively use participant stories.

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How to Bring Your Work to Life with Participants’ Words

You need potential participants or clients to see why they should jump up and run to you, and you need potential donors and funders to see why they should give as much as they can. You can describe all of the benefits in perfect detail, but that won’t make readers imagine what it feels like to receive them. So what will?

Quotations! Never underestimate the power of a real person’s words. Direct quotations from participants bring in human voices that the reader can hear and can’t help relating to, voices that sound like people they know.

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How to Organize Your Writing: Quick Tips
that Illustrate Their Own Points

Most people probably don’t think very deeply about this topic, but the choice you make will affect your readers’ experience of your writing. Whether you want to organize complex items or emphasize simple ones, and whether you want your reader to pay attention to every one of a long list of items or to compound them all together, your choice of when and how to use lists will either aid or thwart the impression you actually want to make. The following quick guide includes a bullet list to describe when you might want to use a list, a numbered list to illustrate when you might want to use a bullet or numbered list, a sentence-form list to explore when you might want to use one of those, and a non-list paragraph to discuss when you might be best off not using a list at all.

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