Administrative Writing

Administrative Writing

These documents are filed, quoted, forwarded, and occasionally produced years later in a dispute. A missing reference number costs a week. An invented regulation costs credibility that does not come back.

Governed by document-core. This skill adds the required elements, the register, the country conventions, and the evidence rule at its strictest.

Never merged with technical documentation. The audiences, registers, structures and failure consequences have nothing in common.

1. The evidence rule, at its strictest

document-core section 5 forbids inventing facts. Here it is absolute, because these documents assert things about the real world on someone's behalf.

Never write, unless taken from a source in front of you:

a statute, article, decree, regulation or case reference
a registration, licence, accreditation, tax or company number
an institution's name, department, address or procedure
a person's title, function, qualification or authority
a date, deadline, amount, rate or reference number
a prior exchange, its date or its content
a commitment, guarantee or obligation

Legal references are the most dangerous. A plausible article number in a formal letter is quoted back, relied upon, and discovered to be wrong by the recipient rather than by you. A citation is copied from the text of the law or it does not appear.

Missing elements are marked visibly in the draft, never filled and never silently dropped:

[TO PROVIDE: contract reference from your file]
[TO VERIFY: exact department name at the recipient organisation]
[TO CONFIRM WITH COUNSEL: whether this clause applies to a fixed term contract]

Anything touching legal effect, entitlement or obligation is marked for a qualified human. This skill drafts; it does not advise.

2. Required elements

Absence of any of these is what gets a document returned, ignored or ruled inadmissible.

The subject line is the field most often wasted. It is what the recipient's filing system indexes and what a later reader sees first.

3. Structure of the body

Four movements, in this order, whatever the document.

1. Purpose      why you are writing, in one sentence, first
2. Facts        what happened, in order, each verifiable
3. Request      what you want, specifically, and by when
4. Availability what you provide, and how to reach you

Rules:

• The purpose is the first sentence. An administrative reader decides in one line whether this is theirs to handle.
• Facts are dated and separable. Anything the recipient can check is easier to act on than a characterisation.
• The request is one action, addressed to someone able to take it. Two requests are two letters, or a numbered list where each is separately answerable.
• A deadline is a date, never a duration. Within 15 days starts a dispute about when it started.
• No emotion, no accusation, no irony. Facts and a request are more effective and survive being read by a third party later.
• Never threaten a consequence you cannot or will not carry out.

Length: one page for a request or a notice. Two pages is already a document that needs an attachment instead.

4. Register

Formal, impersonal, unambiguous. Not archaic and not stiff.

Politeness carries no information; precision does. A courteous, precise letter is more respectful of the recipient's time than an elaborate vague one.

Ambiguity is the defect that matters. Every sentence is checked for a second reading, because a sentence that can be read two ways will be read the other way at the moment it counts.

5. Country conventions

The output language is the recipient's. So are the conventions, and they are not translations of each other.

French correspondence deserves specific attention because its closing carries the hierarchical relationship and a wrong one is noticed:

• To an institution or a superior, the full form: Je vous prie d'agreer, Madame, Monsieur, l'expression de mes salutations distinguees.
• The salutation used in the closing repeats the opening one exactly.
• Between professional equals, Cordialement or Bien cordialement is sufficient and the full form reads as distant.
• The typographic rules of writing/resources/typographie-francaise.md apply to any French output: non-breaking spaces before double punctuation, guillemets, capitalisation of titles.

When the recipient's country is not in this table, find its convention from a source. Do not extrapolate. Formal correspondence conventions are not predictable from a neighbouring country.

6. Document types

Formal letter or request

The four movements of section 3, one page, one request.

Notice, formal statement or demand

The fact, dated
The rule, obligation or agreement it engages, cited from its text
The consequence, if any, stated plainly and without exaggeration
The action required, with a date

Never states a legal consequence that has not been verified with someone qualified. Mark it and stop.

Attestation or certificate

Identity of the person certifying, and the authority under which they do
Identity of the subject
The fact certified, precisely bounded in time and scope
Date and place
Signature

Certifies only what the signatory can personally attest. Nothing inferred, nothing generalised, nothing about a period they did not observe. A phrase such as has always been is not certifiable and does not appear.

Memorandum

To, From, Date, Subject
Purpose, first line
Background, only what is needed to act
Decision or request
Action required, with owner and date

Internal, so shorter and more direct, but the required elements do not change: it will still be forwarded and filed.

Meeting minutes

Meeting, date, time, place
Present, absent, apologies
Agenda
Per item: discussion in substance, decision taken, action with owner and date
Next meeting
Approval status

Minutes record decisions and actions, not conversation. Attribution only where it matters to the decision. Disagreements are recorded as positions, never as character. Circulated for correction within days, while memory is still available.

Application or submission document

Every element the receiving body requires, in the order it requires
Their references and identifiers, quoted exactly
A checklist of attachments, matching what is enclosed
Nothing they did not ask for

Requirements are taken from the body's own published instructions. Where a requirement is unclear, it is marked and the body is asked, rather than guessed. A guessed requirement is the standard reason an application is returned.

7. Before sending

• Every element of section 2 present.
• Purpose in the first sentence.
• Every fact verifiable, every date correct.
• No invented reference, number, statute, title or institution.
• Every marked gap either resolved or visibly still marked.
• The request is one action, addressed to someone able to take it.
• The deadline is a date.
• Salutation and closing match, in the recipient's convention.
• Attachments listed, numbered, and actually enclosed.
• No sentence readable two ways.
• Nothing asserted that a qualified professional should assert.
• Read once as the recipient, and once as a third party reading it in two years with no context.

8. Protocol

1. Load document-core. Identify sender, recipient, purpose and the country whose conventions apply.
2. Set the output language to the recipient's.
3. Choose the type from section 6 and list its required elements.
4. Collect the facts. Separate what is sourced from what is assumed.
5. Mark every missing element visibly. Ask for the essential ones in one batch, through project-brief.
6. Draft the four movements of section 3.
7. Apply the country conventions of section 5.
8. Apply document-design for the letterhead, margins and signature block.
9. Run the checklist of section 7, and the eight-point gate with the administrative panel.
10. Deliver with the marked gaps listed separately, so none is missed.
11. Where a PDF is required, hand to pdf-production and verify the render.

9. Auto-critique

Score 0 to 5: every required element present, purpose first, facts verifiable and dated, one actionable request, deadline as a date, register formal without padding, country conventions correct, no sentence readable two ways, nothing invented, gaps marked rather than filled, nothing asserted that requires a qualified professional.

Threshold: no axis below 3, average at least 4.3. These documents carry consequences, and the threshold reflects it.

Automatic failure: an invented legal reference, registration number, institution or credential; an assertion of legal effect made without a qualified source; or a gap silently filled with a plausible value.

10. Interfaces

• Upstream: document-core, project-brief.
• Downstream: document-design, pdf-production, self-critique.
• Related: report-writing for documents that support a decision rather than make a request.