Two ways to start
Two openings for the same piece.
A. Nowadays, the environment is one of the most important issues facing the world, and everyone must do their part.
B. The question is asked in a form that cannot be answered: do individual choices make a difference to climate change? Both available answers are true, which is usually a sign that two different questions are being run together.
Four questions.
1. How many hedges are in opening A?
2. What does B do that A does not?
3. What is both available answers are true claiming?
4. Is A wrong?
The model · 360 words
Whether individual behaviour matters
The question is asked in a form that cannot be answered: do individual choices make a difference to climate change? Both available answers are true, which is usually a sign that two different questions are being run together.
The first is arithmetical. Household consumption accounts for a substantial share of emissions in most industrialised economies — the figure usually quoted is somewhere around two-thirds, though what it includes varies enough that I would not defend the number itself. On that reading individual choices are most of the problem by definition, because most of the problem is what people buy, heat and drive.
The second question is about leverage, and it gives the opposite answer. The choices available to a household are constrained by decisions taken elsewhere: whether the electricity is decarbonised, whether there is a bus, whether a rented flat can be insulated at all. A tenant in a poorly insulated flat cannot choose their way out of it, and telling them to try appears, on the evidence about behaviour campaigns, to achieve little.
So the honest version has two halves. Individual consumption is where the emissions are; individual choice is not usually where the lever is. Those are not in conflict, and the argument survives because each side quotes the half that suits it.
There is one thing I would add, and it is my inference rather than anybody’s finding. The behaviours that seem to matter most are not the consumption ones at all. They are the ones that change what other people can choose: how somebody votes, what they say at a planning meeting, whether they ask their landlord, what they install when they do have a choice. Those are individual actions with structural effects, and they are almost never what a campaign asks for.
What would settle this is better evidence on that last claim, and as far as I can tell it does not yet exist in a usable form. Until it does, the defensible position is a narrow one: individual consumption matters arithmetically, individual choice matters where a choice actually exists, and the actions worth encouraging are probably the ones that widen somebody else’s options.
Four questions about the model.
1. What does the first paragraph do?
2. How does the writer handle the two-thirds figure?
3. What is the fourth paragraph for?
4. Why does the fifth paragraph say my inference rather than anybody’s finding?
Repair a weaker one
The five moves: reject the form of the question · the first answer, with its evidence and its limits · the second answer, which points the other way · the reconciliation — why both are true · your own inference, marked as one, and what would settle it.
Below, a second piece with four sentences removed.
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
Food miles are the most intuitive environmental metric and one of the least useful. [1]
The reason is that transport is a small share of the total footprint for most foods — the figure usually quoted is under a tenth, though it varies enormously by product. [2] How the food was grown, and whether it came from a ruminant, dominate almost everything else.
[3] Air-freighted produce is a genuine exception, and it is a small enough category to be identified and avoided.
None of which means that distance is irrelevant. [4]
It means that a metric anybody can calculate has crowded out several that matter more and that nobody can see.
From absolute to defensible
Rewrite each line for a written sustainability piece. Fill the slot that is missing, or empty the one that is overfull. The words in the avoid list must not appear.
Absolute → defensible
Everyone knows that individual action makes no difference whatsoever.
Absolute → defensible
Local food is always better for the environment.
Over-hedged → defensible
It may possibly perhaps be the case that transport could be a fairly small part of it.
Vanished author → owned
It could be argued that campaigns target the wrong behaviours.
Wrong slot → right slot
The review possibly found that household consumption is around two-thirds of emissions.
Spoken → written
Honestly at the end of the day people just need to fly less, it’s obvious.
Three questions.
1. What does the first paragraph do?
2. You want to use a number whose definition varies. What do you do?
3. Where does your own inference go, and how is it marked?
The piece
How the twenty-three minutes run. Five to plan, fourteen to write, four to exchange. The plan is where the slots get assigned; filling them while you are making sentences produces the stack.
Stage 1 · Alone · 5 minutes · Plan
A sustainability question you know something about and hold a view on: flying, meat, fast fashion, recycling, cars in cities, offsetting, nuclear power, water, land use.
Five lines, with the slots marked next to each claim.
- 1 · The question, and the two questions hiding inside it.
- 2 · The first answer, with its evidence: what kind, from where, and how far it extends.
- 3 · The second answer, which points the other way, with the same treatment.
- 4 · The reconciliation: why both can be true, in one sentence.
- 5 · Your own inference, and what evidence would settle it. Mark it as yours before you write a word of prose.
Stage 2 · Alone · 14 minutes · Write
Three hundred and sixty words, five or six paragraphs, one per move.
Fourteen minutes. Banned throughout: nowadays · everyone knows · it could be argued that · always · never · proves, and any two hedges inside one slot.
- Open by rejecting the form of the question. No general statement about the planet.
- Fill scope and source on every empirical claim. Those are the two slots whose absence misleads.
- Use exactly one instrument per slot. If you catch yourself writing may possibly, delete one.
- Mark your inference as an inference, and mark anything you are taking on trust.
- Close on the defensible position — narrow, and stated as narrow. No call to action.
Stage 3 · Pairs · 4 minutes · Exchange
Swap. Three jobs, in this order, and none of them is proofreading.
Four minutes. Absolutes, stacks, and the wrong slot.
- Circle every absolute — always, never, everyone, all, proves, and any bare present simple stating a contested fact. Write the count at the top.
- Find every place where two instruments sit in one slot, and cross one out.
- For each hedge that remains, ask your partner one question: is that the part you are unsure about? Mark the ones where the answer is no.
- Say which single claim in the piece you would want a source for. That is the slot the writer left bare.
What your partner found
Two questions.
1. Which slot did you leave bare most often?
2. How many of your hedges were on the part you are actually unsure about?
Narrow, and stated as narrow
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. Which two slots mislead most when left bare?
2. How should a piece like this end?
Next. The unit task: a policy discussion and the finished piece, assessed on whether every claim you make can survive one question asked by somebody else.