Policy news writing rules: eight habits that keep an entry from becoming a false claim

A policy record fails in a particular way. Nobody falsifies anything. Someone writes a note in a hurry, in the present tense, without saying where it came from, and eighteen months later that note is being read as a statement of what applies.

These are drafting rules for the entry itself. They are house style, not law, and they exist because the sentence you write is the thing that will be believed.

What to take away

Rule one: name the actor in the first clause

Start every entry with who did the thing.

A legislature passing a statute, a regulator issuing guidance under one, a court deciding a dispute, and a service changing its own terms are four different events with four different consequences. A sentence opening with "new rules require" hides which one happened.

The named actor also tells a future reader where to look for the next development, which is most of the value of the record.

Rule two: no bare present tense

"Applies to services above a certain size" reads as current fact forever. Write the status instead: proposed, in consultation, adopted, published, in force, applying from a stated date, or being enforced. If you do not know which, that is the entry: "status not established, checked on this date."

The vocabulary of legal status is technical, so a general definition of the ordinary terms is worth having at hand. Cornell's plain explanation of administrative law covers how a statute relates to the rules an agency makes under it. Its entry on rulemaking covers how those rules are made.

Both describe one system's terminology, while other systems use different words for similar stages, so use the terms to understand the shape rather than to translate.

Rule three: attribution inside the entry

Each factual sentence names its source. Not a bibliography at the bottom: a source attached to the claim, because entries get copied out of context and the ones that travel are the ones without their sourcing.

Three parts make an attribution usable: which document, from which body, retrieved on which date. A URL alone ages badly, and a document title alone cannot be found again once the page moves.

Rule four: separate what it says from what it means

Keep two fields and never merge them. The first is a description of the text, phrased so that anyone reading the document would agree it is accurate. The second is your reading of what it means for you, phrased as opinion and signed.

Merging the two is the most common defect in internal policy notes. It produces a document where a contestable interpretation is indistinguishable from a quotation, and nobody can tell which part to re-check when something changes.

Rule five: hedge honestly, not defensively

There is a difference between a hedge that carries information and a hedge that protects the writer. "Applies from a date that has not been set" tells the reader something. "May potentially be relevant in certain circumstances" tells them nothing and costs them the time to read it.

A useful test: delete every hedge, then put back only the ones whose absence would make the sentence untrue.

Rule six: record the negative findings

Write down what you looked for and did not find. An entry saying that you checked a regulator's decisions page on a date and there was nothing new is worth keeping, because the alternative is a gap that a future reader cannot distinguish from nobody having looked.

The same applies to questions you could not answer. Record the question, what you checked, and why it remains open.

Rule seven: one entry, one instrument

Do not bundle. When a statute, a piece of guidance under it, and a service's implementation of both arrive in the same week, they are three entries that reference each other. Bundled into one, they become impossible to update, because the parts move independently and at different speeds.

A phrasing table

The right column is longer. That is the cost, and it is small next to the cost of acting on the left column.

Rule eight: date the entry, not just the event

Two dates on every entry: what happened and when, and when you last looked. A reader can then judge staleness without re-checking everything, which is what makes a shared record usable by someone who did not write it.

When an entry concerns something a service changed, not a public body, the archiving problem is sharper: policy pages are revised without a changelog.

the mechanics of platform rules covers the general handling, and what an enforcement action does covers consequences for individual accounts. For public rules, how regulation reaches you sets out identifying the responsible body first.

Common questions

Is this not excessive for an internal note nobody else reads?

Internal notes are read by someone eventually, usually under pressure, usually by a person who was not there. The rules cost a few extra words per entry and are what make the note survive that reading.

Who should write entries: the subject expert or the person running the watch?

The person running the watch, with the expert reviewing. An expert writing from knowledge tends to omit the sourcing, because the claim is obvious to them, and the sourcing is the part that has to be there in two years.

How do I stop old entries from being quoted as current?

Put the observation date in the first line rather than the last, and mark superseded entries at the top rather than deleting them. Deletion looks like the entry was wrong; a supersession note shows what changed. Reading the underlying record of what a settlement establishes works the same way: the operative document, not the summary.