Writing in an “Institutional Style”

Even when you have a firm grasp of the overall organization of your report, you still need to put words together in sentences that make sense to your readers. Sometimes, this happens easily. Other times, you may struggle with your choice of words, their placement in the sentence, and the rules of the English language.

Often the result is long-winded prose filled with jargon, unnecessary elaboration, and verbs whose action is buried in abstract nouns. Despite all your efforts, you might write this sentence:

In order for an optimization in the reduction of the rate of return for fund members, it was concurred, not without considerable and vigorous debate, by policymakers that the implementation of a mild relative rate of return guarantee would, inter alia, create fiscal synergies to contribute to the financial prosperity of fund investors.

Why do we write this way? One reason is the culture of the organization—its jargon, its apparent lack of clear accountability, its elaborate review process. Another is the understandable insecurity of writers new to the job, writing in a language that is not their own. Your Background Readings refer to this style of writing as  “institutional writing.”

The best way to avoid the weakness of institutional writing is to recognize its various forms and revise your mechanics and style word by word and sentence by sentence.

We have saved this discussion of mechanics and style for the last module because that is where you should deal with it in the actual report writing process—at the end, after you’ve gotten your main ideas down on paper according to the organization you developed in your plan.