The graduate writing problem

Public affairs agencies hire very smart people.

Firsts from good universities. Strong on policy detail. Excellent at parliamentary briefing notes, position papers, Select Committee submissions. People who can hold a complex argument in their head and render it precisely on the page.

And then they’re asked to write a LinkedIn post. Or a campaign landing page. Or a thread that a journalist might actually read.

And it falls apart.

Why the training works against you

It’s not the person’s fault. They’ve been trained – by school, by university, by the job itself – to write for an audience that rewards complexity, hedging and precision. That’s exactly the right register for a briefing to a Special Adviser. It’s exactly the wrong register for general consumption.

Academic and policy writing is designed to demonstrate that you’ve considered every angle, acknowledged every counterargument, and arrived at a conclusion that can withstand scrutiny from a hostile expert reader. It rewards length. It rewards qualification. It treats certainty as a kind of intellectual failure.

Public-facing writing works on almost opposite principles. Short sentences. Active voice. One idea at a time. A willingness to have an actual opinion and state it clearly, without immediately undermining it with caveats. A conclusion that lands rather than dissolves.

The skills are not just different – they’re in active tension. The instincts that make someone good at one make them worse at the other, at least until they’ve consciously learned to switch register.

The consequences

The gap shows up in predictable places. Campaign websites that bury the ask under three paragraphs of context. Press releases that lead with the organisation rather than the story. Social posts that read like executive summaries. Email subject lines written by someone who has never thought about why they open emails.

The irony is that the underlying argument is often strong. The organisations producing this content have genuinely interesting things to say. The problem isn’t the thinking – it’s the translation.

And translation is a skill. Not everyone has it naturally, and the people most valued in your organisation for their policy expertise are often the least likely to have developed it, because nothing in their training required them to.

What to do about it

There are three ways organisations address this. They hire for it – bringing in people with journalism or content backgrounds specifically to bridge the gap. They train for it – investing in writing programmes that help policy staff understand how to shift register. Or they bring it in – working with external partners who can take the thinking and turn it into something that works for a public audience.

Each approach has its place. What doesn’t work is pretending the gap doesn’t exist, or assuming that anyone who can write a briefing note can write a campaign page. They’re different disciplines. Treating them as interchangeable produces communications that satisfies the people who wrote them and reaches almost nobody else.

The organisations that win the public argument aren’t always the ones with the strongest policy case. They’re the ones who can translate it.

Upwards Digital works with public affairs agencies, advocacy organisations and civil society groups across the UK. Almost all our work comes through referral. If you’d like to talk about your communications, we’re easy to find.