Policy writing skills series: What is a policy brief? How do I write one?
Image: @oddityandgraceh.com/@oddityandgrace
By Holly Jarman
A policy brief, or policy memo, is a short piece of writing designed to summarize the key aspects of a policy issue for an audience of policymakers, key stakeholders or the public. It can be written as a more descriptive piece, providing background on the policy in question, or can be written to persuade the audience to take a specific action.
Policy briefs are useful in all sorts of contexts, whether you are trying to advocate for a new policy, frame a problem in a specific way, or provide easily digestible information on a policy issue to your boss, your colleagues, your organization’s board of directors or your elected representative. How should you go about writing one?
Step 1: Define the task
You won’t be able to write a very good brief until you understand why it is needed. What are you trying to achieve by writing and sharing this brief? This will determine the type of brief you write. Are you trying to make a specific recommendation for action (sometimes known as a position-taking or advocacy brief)? Or are you writing a more descriptive or informative brief where you might actually need to avoid recommending policy actions or taking political positions?
While you can write a brief as an individual, most of the time you’ll be writing a policy brief on behalf of an organization or coalition, or for a client. As such, defining the task requires using your very best team-building and communication skills to find out from your boss / coalition partner / client exactly what is needed. Do they expect the brief to answer specific questions, or include certain pieces of information? Do they want the brief to take on a specific format? If it’s appropriate to ask, do they have a model in mind -a prior brief, perhaps? Most importantly, what is the deadline?
Step 2: Know your audience
It’s important to ask two more key questions at this stage. First, who will definitely read the brief? It’s best if a policy brief is not targeted at everyone simultaneously. In fact, if you think you have more than one audience for the brief, you might want to write two separate briefs instead.
If you’ve correctly defined the task in step #1, you should know who your audience are, whether they are elected representatives, officials in a health agency, members of advocacy groups, or the public. Then you can start to think about how to target your brief to your audience. Are your audience experts in the topic, or not? If not, what expertise, education or experience do they have that you can leverage to help you convey your message?
Once you know who will definitely read the brief, you need to also ask, who else might read it? This is an important question because your brief will most likely be distributed in electronic format. And that means it is likely to reach people other than the direct recipients. Hopefully, that’s positive and it means more interested people will see your message. But it’s a good rule of thumb to always assume that any briefing will be publicly available, even if that’s not the intent, and even if it contains politically or commercially sensitive information, and adjust your presentation accordingly. You might want to check that sensitive information is accompanied by the correct context, for example.
Step 3: Decide on a structure
Often, you’ll need to conform to the expectations of your organization / coalition members / client, and it’s easier to work from a pre-existing model when one is available. But some of the time you’ll be left to create the structure of the brief yourself. Some key points to keep in mind when doing this include:
It’s best to summarize the key points of the brief up front. Three sentences/bullet points or less is a good rule of thumb. Because policymakers and their staff are busy people, it is likely that the summary is the only thing that gets read. Make it count. If you are writing a brief that ends in a recommendation for action, make sure you put that recommendation in the summary as well.
Decide what the main sections will be and how you will use section headings. One good tip is to avoid non-descriptive headings like ‘background’ or ‘introduction’ and replace them with headings that summarize the key point of that section, e.g., ‘Children survive and thrive when mothers have access to good food’.
You may wish to create a document template for your policy brief prior to starting to write, in order to save time with formatting and referencing.
If working as part of a team, consider how to share documents in ways that maximize efficiency, e.g., will one person handle visuals, another referencing? Who will be responsible for final editing and proofreading? At what stage will you move from an online to a desktop version of the document?
Step 4: Write text
There are many ways to generate the text of your brief, so feel free to pick a method that fits with your own working style. Some approaches to consider include:
Outline first. Write an outline that places the key points you want to make in a logical order, with opening and concluding statements that summarize your key message. This might take multiple attempts and edits to get right. Then go through the outline and flesh out the text around each bullet point.
Write first. Write freely, transferring your thoughts to the page in no particular order. Keep writing no matter what, using symbols to note when you get stuck on a word or phrase, when you need a statistic but don’t have it, or where you need to insert a reference, e.g., ‘Smoking rates among young people declined by X% in 2020, although …[something describing youth vaping rates] (citation to Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids).’ Write until you’ve run out of steam. Then use this initial text to create an outline. Go through the outline and flesh out any sections that are incomplete.
Timed writing. If you respond well to pressure you might want to set a timer so that you write for half an hour or an hour then stop and review your work. This can help some people generate an initial draft quickly, giving them more time to revise and edit.
Parallel note taking. If you find that your draft is quickly overwhelmed by notes and quotes from your reference texts rather than your own prose, you might want to keep your reference notes in a separate document or spreadsheet. If you are the kind of person who gets stuck reading the details of every research article, you might want to try forcing yourself to summarize each piece you read in three bullet points or less.
Serial note taking. Another approach is to schedule separate research and writing segments of time. During the research segments, you may only read reference materials and take notes. During the writing segments, you may only read your notes and write prose.
Step 5: Edit, then edit, then edit some more
Editing is perhaps the most important stage of writing a brief. You should always make sure to allow adequate time to edit, because a good idea, expressed badly, will not land. When editing, there are several key things to bear in mind:
If making an argument, does the argument come through strongly? Your reader should be able to tell what your request for action is and why that action is important from the first paragraph alone. A good tip when writing on a tight deadline is to focus your editing time on the beginning and end of the brief.
Is your brief appropriately tailored to your audience? If it’s a descriptive brief summarizing a policy issue, does it prioritize the most essential information that your audience needs to read? If discussing a technical or scientific subject, have you adequately explained technical or scientific terms in plain language? Have you spelled out any acronyms? When reading through the text, be sensitive to any language you use that might cause a non-expert to draw the wrong conclusions. One easy way to know whether you’ve done this is to show the whole thing to a trusted colleague or friend who is a non-expert. Over time, you’ll get better at spotting these errors by yourself.
If your brief is too long or unfocussed, would cutting back any background description improve it? Policy brief rookies who are learning about a policy issue for the first time often make the error of providing too much background information and then struggle to fit the rest of the material into the brief. Are you only providing essential background information that the reader needs to understand the rest of the brief?
If you’ve drawn arguments, data, or visuals from other sources, have you acknowledged those sources in line with the structural requirements of the brief? Some formats may allow references or hyperlinks while others will not. In the latter case, make extra sure that your writing does not paraphrase existing reference materials.
If you will be presenting this work or talking about it with policymakers, colleagues or the public, use this time to practice key talking points. Can you summarize your key argument without looking at the brief? Can someone else summarize your key points after skimming the brief? The process of reading the brief out loud, then trying to summarize it without reading the brief, can help you improve the text and find new ways to make your argument now and in the future.
Please, please, proofread your text. Use the features of your word processor. Read the brief out loud. Print it. Read it again. Give it to someone else to read in print or out loud. If you have the luxury of time, do something else for an hour then come back and read the brief again. There is no excuse not to do some of these things!
Congratulations! You’ve written a policy brief. Don’t beat yourself up if it wasn’t perfect the first time. Learn from any mistakes and incorporate those lessons into the next brief. This is a skill that gets better the more you practice. So go and plan the next one!
