Mohammed.Amin.comFresh thinking from a British Muslim
Summary
19 April 2011
This piece is aimed at Muslim readers, but will be helpful to anyone who wants to write to the media or to a politician.
From time to time, everyone is annoyed by something they read in print or see on television. The easiest thing is to grumble to your friends, but that achieves nothing. It is far better to respond.
I want to share some good practice guidelines for both letters and for website comments.
Take action yourself instead of leaving it to others.
Be realistic about how much you can do, as it does take time to write a good letter.
If you are not making any written complaints at present, sending just one well written letter a year will be a great improvement. I illustrate below what even a single letter can achieve. There are tens of thousands of British Muslims who have the requisite skills; once you start doing it you can persuade your friends to do the same to magnify the impact.
There are a variety of ways to respond, which I have listed in order of both increasing effort and increasing effectiveness.
In Britain, we live in a free country. When it comes to private correspondence, I have no qualms about writing to any politician or newspaper editor without any fear of retribution. That of course excludes silly behaviour such as making death threats!
When it comes to correspondence that will be seen by the public at large, you need to consider any policies that your employer may have, if you are an employee. Similarly most partnerships have policies regarding what their partners may say in public. You need to ensure in advance that any public correspondence by you is permitted.
For example, while a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, I could not write about any accounting or tax matters without having the material reviewed internally in advance despite my being a partner. The firm had a simple and understandable goal of ensuring that it spoke with one voice on such matters, despite having nearly 1,000 partners in the UK and over 16,000 staff. Everything I wrote about taxation or Islamic finance while at PwC went through those approval processes, even though I was UK head of Islamic finance.
When I wanted to start writing about Muslim community issues, I obtained formal agreement from the firm’s Senior Partner that it was worthwhile for me to do so, and that this was not subject to PwC’s internal processes for writing on tax or accounting matters.
Most importantly, never write anything, whether in a public forum or even in private 1-1 correspondence, that you would be embarrassed to see leaked to the newspapers and sent to every person you know. For example, even though I was very angry, when I wrote my piece on Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, I was conscious that this would potentially be read by all my Muslim friends and all my Jewish friends. That mindset leads you to write carefully.
Even if you write it as carefully as you write a letter, an email makes less impact. There are several reasons for this.
Accordingly, if you are going to put in the effort to compose a good message, you might as well spend the cost of a stamp and send a paper letter.
I was fortunate that my career as a tax advisor gave me extensive experience at letter writing. When I was a junior, my superiors regularly savaged my draft letters, often rewriting them completely. In later years, I found myself doing the same. This experience taught me that writing good letters is a learned skill. On 27 January 2012 I wrote to the Superintendent of the US Military Academy at West Point, and have posted on this website an annotated copy of the email explaining the construction.
Be prepared to spend at least half a day composing a letter which is one A4 page or less. Good letters are not easy to write, and need careful thought before you write the first word. Once you have written the letter, put it aside for a couple of hours, and then review it again with the eyes of a reader. Only send it once you are totally happy with it.
The effort involved is the reason I suggest starting with a personal goal of sending only one such letter a year.
You need to be clear in your own mind:
Those points then drive the composition.
If the letter is being written for publication in a newspaper, you need to abide by all of the newspaper’s written guidelines regarding length, giving your full name and address etc. As a general point, try to stay well inside the newspaper’s length restriction, as short letters are more likely to get published.
Every mistake in a letter, no matter how small, causes the reader to think less of you. Make several mistakes and the reader will cease to care about what you are writing and see only the mistakes. Even a comma out of place is a mistake.
Do not rely upon spell checkers. Print the letter and read it carefully on paper with a red pen to mark any mistakes. Experience shows that reading things on screen is less accurate than reading the letter when printed on paper.
Unless you are very confident of your ability at spelling, punctuation and grammar, you should also get someone else to check over what you have written.
As soon as you insult the recipient, or accuse him of malevolence, he will stop paying any attention to what you have written. As an illustration, read my letter to the Israeli ambassador after the Gaza flotilla incident.
If you shout at somebody in person, they get annoyed, and if you shout loud enough they cover their ears and stop listening to anything that you are saying.
Exactly the same thing happens if you shout in writing. That includes actions such as:
It is often tempting to make threats when writing. Some are obviously illegal, such as death threats! However making even legal threats is a mistake. It simply puts the reader's back up and turns him against your message.
The people you will be writing to are not stupid. Politicians are aware that voters may stop supporting them, charities that donors may send their money elsewhere, businesses that customers may go to another store, editors that readers may switch to another newspaper. By threatening such action, you are simply insulting the reader’s intelligence, which is not conducive to having your message received well.
If you want to be taken seriously as a correspondent, you need to stick to the facts. See my letter to the Israeli ambassador, which carefully avoids assuming anything about what happened during the flotilla incident.
A private letter does not need to be as short as a letter intended for publication. However if you cannot say something in one A4 page, you have probably failed to think carefully enough about what you want to say.
Readers have short attention spans. It is far better to get one or two points over which the recipient absorbs, than send a letter with 10 points which the reader does not take in.
Copied below is my private letter to a newspaper editor. It is anonymised as I promised to keep it confidential. While one of my friends thought it was far too mild, it achieved a personal reply from a busy and senior editor. Reading between the lines of the reply it is clear that the editor understood that the piece I was complaining about was not a good one. That was all I needed to achieve with this one letter.
As an exercise, I suggest analysing my letter to figure out the reason particular words and phrases are included.
12 xxxx 2009
Mr aaaa
Editor in Chief
[Address]
Dear Mr aaaa
ISLAMIC FINANCE
This private letter is not for publication, and will also not be publicised by bbbb.
I was dismayed when a friend pointed out cccc’s piece “dddd” which appeared on your website on Tuesday. It drove a Jewish friend to describe cccc in terms that are unprintable.
I don’t know what qualifies cccc to write about Islamic finance. My own credentials are summarised in the Appendix to this letter. I am confident that as Editor in Chief you have accuracy standards for your newspaper, but don’t know the extent to which you expect your columnists to abide by them. cccc’s column was so poor that I can imagine eeee turning in his grave!
In my professional capacity, I regularly brief journalists from a number of publications, including the Financial Times, on Islamic finance. If you would like one of your financial reporters to gain an understanding of the subject, please ask them to contact me via the bbbb office. Equally, if you are willing to give me some space I would be happy to write a piece correcting the many mistakes in the one by cccc.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely
Mohammed Amin
APPENDIX - This comprised 2/3 of an A4 page setting out my Islamic finance credentials.
REPLY
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
Mr Mohammed Amin
[Address]
Dear Mr Amin
Thank you for taking the trouble to write and I, too, would be grateful if our correspondence could be kept private.
Firstly, let me stress that cccc is a respected columnist and, as such, I don't attempt to censor her views. That said, it should also be stressed that the views you are referring to only appeared in a contribution she made to the ffff's website and not in her column in the paper which is her main platform.
For my part, I take on board the points you make and may well take up your generous offer to brief some of our journalists on the subject of sharia finance.
With kind regards,
aaaa
When you see a website article with several hundred comments underneath it, you may wonder what the point is of your adding another comment. Quite often there is none.
However, many articles attract fewer comments. The reasons for making a comment are:
Website comments are usually made by people using pseudonyms. That seems to encourage writers to be rude and offensive. Using your real name will ensure you are disciplined about what you write, because your name will be against it.
When I read website comments, I pay more attention to those where the writer has used what seems to be their real name. Such a writer is displaying the courage of their convictions, unlike those hiding behind pseudonyms. I believe that the psychology of other readers is the same.
With most websites you can upload your picture when registering for comments. The same effect can be achieved if you log in using your Facebook or Twitter accounts for example, assuming that you use a proper picture to identify yourself on Facebook or Twitter. (If you don’t, you should.)
The rationale for using your picture is the same as the rationale for using your real name. It causes other readers to take your comment more seriously.
The comment obviously does not deserve the level of effort needed for a real letter. For a start, you don’t have a definite recipient who is going to read it.
However, you should still ensure that it is written in perfect English, is polite, short and that you are clear before you start what point you want to make.
I suggest looking at the Daily Express website article by Ann Widdecombe about Islamic mortgages. To read it, first read the main story and then read the comments starting with the bottom one first, since that is the chronological order.
Note how my 24 March comment claims authority as an expert (with a link to my website to prove the claim) before proceeding to politely correct her mistakes. I inadvertently spelt her name wrong, and posted an apology on 26 March.
In comparison, the comment from “eMuslim” on 26 March is rude to Ann by calling her “a foolish ignorant” as well as being grammatically incorrect itself in that heading. It is anonymous. It refers to an MCB briefing paper which the reader cannot access; in website comments you should only refer to documents that you can link to. It is too long. Overall, I think that comment could have been much better if it had followed the guidelines I have given above.
Even as a single writer, you can make a difference, since a well written letter can change the mind of the recipient. I have achieved that on several occasions. That recipient may be an important newspaper editor or politician. Even if the recipient does not change their mind, a well written letter will still have an impact on them.
Commenting on websites takes much less effort. While it does not have the same kind of impact as a letter, it helps to change public discourse and gets your voice out there. It can also encourage other people to follow your example.
Each of us changes the world every day. We can choose to make it a better place.
