Overall Drafting Suggestions

Every CI assignment is different because its audience is different and the CI to be communicated differs. However, there are several basic rules that apply to all communications. As a former CI director for Eastman Kodak noted, "CI analysts are in the consulting and communications business. They are not in the analysis business. The Best analysis is useless unless it is communicated, believed, [and] acted upon." ^[6]

There are a few tips that should be kept in mind when drafting any CI report or document:

• Try to tell the reader, hopefully the end user, when something happened as well as when it was reported to you or published, if the difference is critical.

• Assume nothing about your end users, or very little at best. It is always better to keep the materials simple rather than to use only technical nomenclature. Your end users may not all be conversant with the level of technical detail or nomenclature provided by a source, or the CI may be shared with others lacking that technical facility.

• If you need a sense of editorial direction, fall back on the newspaper editor's tools: tell the end users who, what, where, when, how, and why (especially why).

• Always identify facts in contrast to your, or someone else's, assumptions. Identify all intelligence gaps. Do not be shy about saying that there is no data available on which to draw a reasoned conclusion.

• Think about future end users, readers, and even indexers. That means you should use parallelisms (e.g., both trade name and chemical name) and always clarify acronyms, even if only in an appendix. What is crystal clear to your end users may become indecipherable nonsense to another audience or at a future date.

• Avoid floating comparatives, such as "a 40% increase." They can be confusing, or even misleading. Instead, note the start or end points to provide the end user with the right context. Alternately, you can provide the actual computations.

• Try to develop and maintain a consistent voice and style. It makes the end users more comfortable.

• Avoid the use of military terms, like counter-intelligence. They carry with them unwanted and unwarranted baggage. In addition, their use to emphasize a point can come back to haunt you. ^[7] For example, do you really want to explain away a memo which says "it's time to go to war and stop capitulating," or which refers to an officer's desire to "nuke" the competition? ^[8]

• Note if this report triggers a need for additional CI research.

If you are working with news-type documents, such as CI alerts, or are developing documents (as distinguished from presentations), you should think in terms of bringing the end users' attention to the core of the subject matter. This, in turn, often translates into style issues. ^[9] For example, one key to bringing readers into a passive system, such as Intranet posting of short reports, lies in the careful drafting of the headlines or titles of these documents (by whatever name they are called). Among the useful techniques in preparing a caption, headline, or abstract are these:

• Tell most of, or at least the best of, what is in the following text.

• Look to the end users' needs to generate headline phrases that trigger attention. Words like decline, reversal, and threat, if accurately reflecting the content, can do that.

• Choose the first two or three words very carefully. Experience with e-mail shows that it is these words that often are used as the basis for deleting e-mail without ever reading it. The same style of screening happens when an end users must decide whether to read a CI document.

• Make sure the headline makes sense, even if the end user never goes to the body of the document.