Mastering the STRATFOR Voice: Writing with Authority

1. The STRATFOR Voice Sept. 1, 2011

2. Voice Lessons • Vision: To institutionalize STRATFOR’s voice by introducing it to the writers and training them in its use. • Mission: To ensure a unified and authoritative voice that makes STRATFOR content immediately credible and recognizable. • Purpose: To produce an excellent product.

3. Check List Every STRATFOR analysis must have: • Analytical integrity. • Technical quality. • An appropriate voice.

4. How We Say it What is STRATFOR’s voice? • It is the tone, tenor and pitch of the words we arrange and present to our readers. • These readers are discriminating and expect something more than what they can get from the mainstream media. • This means that the “voice” of STRATFOR must be as distinctive as the content it conveys.

5. How We Say it • To that end, the voice must be direct, dispassionate and credible. • It must not be loud, embellished or boastful. • This does not mean the STRATFOR voice is monotonous or boring. Its vitality comes from its simplicity; we strive to make it less complex because our subject matter can be so complex. • Our goal is to enlighten our readers, not amuse them.

6. Keep it Tight Look for every opportunity to eliminate unnecessary words. For example: • This phrase: “The question as to whether” should be “The question whether” or (even shorter) just “Whether.” • “There is no doubt but that” should be “no doubt” or “doubtless.” • “He is a man who” should simply be “He.”

7. Keep it Tight Develop the habit of using the active voice: • This sentence: “At dawn the gunfire of the rebels could be heard” should be “Dawn came with the sound of rebel gunfire.” • “There were a great number of car parts lying on the street” should be “Car parts littered the street.” • “Upon discovery of the raffle and the three upgraded cells, the cells were dismantled by authorities” should be “After discovering the raffle and three upgraded cells, authorities dismantled the cells.”

8. Be Concrete Deal in particulars and include details that matter: • This sentence: “A period of unfavorable weather set in” should be “It rained every day for a week.” • “He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward” should be “He grinned when he accepted the captured sword and slipped it under his belt.” • “The person kidnapped, a wealthy businessman from Monterrey, was found unharmed the next day” should be “Police found the abductee, vice president of the Monterrey-based steel company Hylsamex, unharmed in the trunk of an abandoned car the next day.”

9. Listen to the Rhythm Vary syntax and avoid strict symmetry: • This is clunky and longer than it needs to be: “MacBeth was very ambitious. This led him to wish to become king of Scotland. The witches told him that this wish of his would come true. The king of Scotland at this time was Duncan. Encouraged by his wife, MacBeth murdered Duncan. He was thus enabled to succeed Duncan as king.” • This is not: “Encouraged by his wife, MacBeth achieved his ambition and realized the prediction of the witches by murdering Duncan and becoming king of Scotland in his place.”

10. Listen to the Rhythm Mix “loose” sentences and “periodic” sentences and avoid a monotonous succession of either type in one paragraph: • A loose sentence begins with the main clause (or point) and continues with subordinate elements, as in: “I found a large hall, obviously a former garage, dimly lit, and packed with cots.” • In a periodic sentence, subordinate elements precede the main clause or split it in two, as in: “Democracy is that system of government under which people, having 60,000,000 native-born adults to choose from, including thousands who are handsome and many who are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head of state.”

11. Listen to the Rhythm Keep related words together: • This sentence: “He only found two mistakes” should be “He found only two mistakes.” • “He noticed a large stain in the rug that was right in the center” should be “He noticed a large stain right in the center of the rug.” • “Either you must grant his request or incur his ill will” should be “You must either grant his request or incur his ill will.”

12. Listen to the Rhythm Strive for parallel construction: • This phrase: “A time not for words but action” should be “A time not for words but for action.” • “The French, the Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese” should be “the French, the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese.” • “His speech was marked by disagreement and scorn for his opponent’s position” should be “His speech was marked by disagreement with and scorn for his opponent’s position.”

13. Don’t Be Insistent or Arrogant All it takes is a slight tweak. For example: • This sentence: “If existing ethnic policies prove counterproductive, in the buffer regions and elsewhere, Beijing must take a different approach” should be “If existing ethnic policies prove counterproductive, in the buffer regions and elsewhere, Beijing may have to take a different approach.” • “As the only truly global power in the modern age, STRATFOR could write a book on the potential threats to American power (in fact, our founder, Dr. Friedman, has done just that).” This is an excellent example of a dangling participle, but I believe it has Freudian undertones.

14. Don’t be Insistent or Pretentious • And when referring to George on first reference I would lose the “Dr.” (sounds like we’re trying to market a brand like “Dr. Phil”) and simply refer to him as “our founder, George Friedman.” James Traub, writing for Foreign Policy magazine (Aug. 19, 2011), actually makes fun of this affectation in his “shout out” to George and STRATFOR: • “Friedman -- sorry, ‘Dr. George Friedman’ -- is Stratfor's founder and CEO, an international affairs theorist of the old school who views geopolitics as the clash of state interests.” Traub refers to George in the next sentence as “The good doctor” (and goes on to agree, I might add, with much of what George said in a recent weekly).

15. Don’t be Insistent or Pretentious • It is perfectly fine to point out our forecasting hits, when we get something right, but we should refrain from being too self-laudatory (which can border on the cheesy). Just keep it short and sweet: “As STRATFOR accurately predicted in its 2009 annual forecast” should simply be: “As STRATFOR predicted in its 2009 annual forecast” (“accurately predicted” would be redundant, in any case). • And remind the reader of this only when it is relevant to the discussion and can be linked to a previous piece. 

16. Tell a Story • Begin at the beginning. • Allude to your thesis early on and make it clear why the reader should continue reading. • Make it easy for him or her to do that. • Pull the reader further in with specificity, clarity and well-chosen words. • Make absolutely no attempt to be cute.

17. Do it Like This Following are good examples of the appropriate STRATFOR voice.First is the lead paragraph of Stick’s June 30, 2011, security weekly “The Seattle Plot: Jihadists Shifting Away From Civilian Targets?” • “On June 22 in a Seattle warehouse, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif pulled an unloaded M16 rifle to his shoulder, aimed it and pulled the trigger repeatedly as he imagined himself gunning down young U.S. military recruits. His longtime friend, Walli Mujahidh, did likewise with an identical rifle, assuming a kneeling position as he engaged his notional targets. The two men had come to the warehouse with another man to

18. Do it Like This inspect the firearms the latter had purchased with money Abdul-Latif had provided him. The rifles and a small number of hand grenades were to be used in an upcoming mission: an attack on a U.S. Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in an industrial area south of downtown Seattle….” After a second paragraph elaborating on the would-be jihadists’ arrest is this concise third paragraph, which clearly explains why this case is worth writing about: • “While the behavior of Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh in this plot demonstrates that they were amateur “wannabe” jihadists rather than seasoned terrorist operatives, their plot could have ended very differently if they had

19. Do it Like This found a kindred spirit in the man they approached for help instead of someone who turned them into the authorities. This case also illustrates some important trends in jihadist terrorism that we have been watching for the past few years as well as a possible shift in mindset within the jihadist movement.”

20. Do it Like This Next are the lead paragraph and the concluding paragraph from George’s Aug. 5, 2008, geopolitical weekly “Solzhenitsyn and the Struggle for Russia's Soul”: • “There are many people who write history. There are very few who make history through their writings. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died this week at the age of 89, was one of them. In many ways, Solzhenitsyn laid the intellectual foundations for the fall of Soviet communism. That is well known. But Solzhenitsyn also laid the intellectual foundation for the Russia that is now emerging. That is less well known, and in some ways more important.”

21. Do it Like This Then his conclusion: • “Solzhenitsyn was far more prophetic about the future of the Soviet Union than almost all of the Ph.D.s in Russian studies. We should entertain the possibility that the rest of Solzhenitsyn’s vision will come to pass. It is an idea that ought to cause the world to be very thoughtful.”

22. Do it Like This Here are the lead paragraphs and concluding paragraphs of the Feb. 24, 2009, geopolitical diary, “Public Divisions Among the Palestinians”: • “Hamas said on Monday that a delegation led by the group’s No. 2 official, Moussa Abu Marzouk, would attend Egyptian-sponsored talks with rival group Fatah in Cairo on Tuesday. In addition to the Hamas-Fatah negotiations, Cairo will be hosting a conference of 13 Palestinian factions who will discuss the future of the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Even as Hamas and Fatah prepared for the talks, relations between the two remained tense, with Hamas accusing the Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority of collaborating with Israel during the recent Gaza offensive.

23. Do it Like This • “There has been, in effect, a civil war within the Palestinian community for years, pitting two radically different visions of Palestine against each other. The older tradition represented by Fatah was secular and socialist, and above all, pan-Arab. Islam was incidental to what it believed, and in some ways it was hostile to Islam, and to Islamic states like Saudi Arabia. Fatah derived its existence from Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser and was part of his historic alignment with the Soviet Union. Indeed, during the 1970s in particular, Fatah itself was closely aligned with the Soviet Union. It represented a very different Palestine from the one Hamas has in mind.”

24. Do it Like This Last two paragraphs: • “The current tensions between Fatah and Hamas are not new; the two sides have been at war for years. Though a stalemate of sorts exists between them, Hamas wants to supplant Fatah. It is unlikely that Hamas can do that. Hamas is at home in Gaza. It is far less at home in the West Bank. What Hamas has done, however, is give Israel precisely what it wanted. There is now a very public civil war between the two Palestinian regions and factions. Hamas clearly thinks it has an opening, given the aging leadership of Fatah and the movement’s lack of charisma. But Fatah is a mature and wily entity. It won’t go gentle into that good night — and it has the support, ironically, of

25. Do it Like This Israel and many Arab countries worried about the rise of Muslim Brotherhood-type Islamism. • “Hamas will not defeat Fatah quickly — and the longer the struggle continues the more Israel benefits.”

26. Do it Like This The teaser, summary, lead-in and conclusion from the May 27, 2011, analysis “Yemen’s Tribal Troubles”: • Teaser: “The Hashid offensive on Sanaa has brought to light the fundamental tension between the modern Yemeni state and its tribal foundation.” • Summary:“The past six days of heavy fighting in Yemen’s capital between forces loyal to the president and armed tribesmen led by the country’s most influential sheikh are spreading legitimate fears of an impending civil war. With the writ of the Yemeni state

27. Do it Like This eroding, the president’s opponents are falling back on “urf,” or tribal law, which the state has traditionally used to govern the country, in order to find a way out of the political crisis. But the power of urf is not what it used to be in Yemen, and the growing reliance on a weakened tribal code in a state under siege could further divide the country.” First two paragraphs: • “A temporary, albeit shaky, cease-fire is being negotiated May 27 between forces loyal to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and armed tribesmen loyal to Hashid tribal sheikh Sadeq al-Ahmar, the eldest of the brothers within the influential al-Ahmar family.

28. Do it Like This • The latest flare-up began May 22 when Saleh refused for the third time to sign an accord mediated by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that would have had him step down within 30 days and pave the way for elections in return for immunity. Saleh loyalists then besieged the UAE Embassy, where U.S., EU and GCC diplomats were discussing ways to salvage the peace deal. The emergency evacuation of foreign diplomats struck a serious blow to Saleh’s credibility and led to intensified calls by U.S., EU and GCC leaders for Saleh to step down once and for all.”

29. Do it Like This Conclusion: • “It is this strain between tribalism and the state that will continue to hamper GCC, U.S. and EU attempts to force a political resolution on Sanaa. Mass demonstrations and negotiated political settlements may be the model of the Arab Spring, but in Yemen, an eye for an eye will be the catalyst for change, whether that change is for better or for worse.”