Writing Guidelines Mandating Quality Army Writing
The ability to prepare clear, concise documents, which advocate a position or advance a goal is an essential leadership skill. Effective writing teaches you the techniques of writing different types of military documents targeted for specific audiences.
To become a more effective communicator, the Army developed some specific guidelines and standards to help you write clearly and concisely.
Define the Standards for Effective Army Writing
The Army Writing Standard
As writers of Army correspondence, you must know and understand the standards for Army writing so you can effectively apply them to your writing. As leaders, you must explain the standards to your subordinates and check their writing for compliance to help them produce correspondence that meets the standards.
You will learn how to recognize and correct passive voice later in this lesson.
Effective Army writing
Effective Army writing transmits a clear message in a single rapid reading and is generally free of errors in grammar, mechanics, and usage.
Good Army writing
Good Army writing is concise, organized, and straight to the point. It meets two essential requirements, putting the main point at the beginning of the correspondence and using the active voice.
Active writing
Active writing emphasizes the doer of the action. It shows whom or what is doing the action in the sentence, and it helps create shorter sentences.
Standard English sentence order
The standard English sentence order, subject–verb–object, works best. It speeds communication and helps the reader understand the point.
Recognize Uniform Effective Writing Standards for Army Writing
Elements of Structure
Overview
Next, you will identify elements of structure inherent to Army writing. The structure of Army writing is simple and consists of two elements: the first, “begin with the main idea,” and the second, “packaging.”
Begin with the Main Idea