The CQ Press Writing Guide for Public Policy

This is a good practical guide for public policy writing. Most public policy writing is dire. This is full of examples, useful checklists, and good advice to make your writing clear and persuasive. A welcome read. It is useful for lobbyists anywhere - I am not based in the USA.

I'm an academic, I love reading academic journals and rarely encounter something that truly bores me...this is the exception. It's packed full of good information - make no mistake about it. It's also mind numbing in the level of tedious detailed examples. Only those with an absolute need should dare tread into this territory.

In many ways, this is the public policy book I wish I had when I started my career. Not because it will teach you how to write public policy documents (only writing public policy documents will teach you that) but it provides useful context. It reminds you for instance that people reading your policy briefs are (usually) very busy. (Though I do wish they had spelled that part of it out.) Personally, it took me a long time to really internalize that the people reading my “words of wisdom” will be almost certainly doing it as they walk into a meeting on the subject and woe be me if my recommendation is longer than a page. (A paragraph or two is best.)I also like that they spent a bit of time on data presentation. In my experience that is one of the hardest things to get right. And that they went over that the most common policy brief is the e-mail.Most of all, I loved the examples throughout the book and the critiques they offered of each. The examples alone are worth it because they can serve as templates of sorts when you have to write that.All in all a good book. It’s aimed at beginners; it even starts by telling (presumably, the beginner straight out of college) that “policy audiences have unique needs and expectations that differ systematically from the academic audiences for whom you learned to write in college.” But even if you have been writing policy briefs for a while now, you will still find it useful. It won’t be quite as eye-opening I suspect, but it will still give you a few good tips and serve as a useful reference.I recommend it.

I want to complain. I received this book this afternoon; the cover was filthy with sticky brown dried stuff, maybe animal feces or urine with some animal hair attached. Doesn't the item get inspected before passing it to another customer?

The CQ Press Writing Guide for Public Policy by Andrew Pennock is first and foremost about writing well as the entire first section of the book comes across more as a writing tutorial with a focus in public policy. While it may seem grade schoolish, no one will read a policy document with grammatical errors and you will be laughed from the room. The second part of the book goes into issues of style and use of various graphics, which can help or hinder ones point depending on how they are used. With the end of chapter exercises, this seems like the ideal book for a course on Public Policy writing.While I thought the majority of the advice in the book was solid, there is at least one area where it is not followed. Pennock talks very clearly about making sure your material is readable and then in Chapter 8 leaves this reader sitting with the book a millimeter from my face to read the itty bitty microscopic type on the issue brief examples in the chapter. Oversight aside, this is a very matter of fact book on how to write public policy that doesn’t have much flash, but gets the job done.