Freeing the Policy Writer Within: David Chrisinger, the Harris Writing Workshop, and the Power of Narrative

In his first week on the job at Harris in early 2019, David Chrisinger, MAPSS’10, was asked to present a workshop on how to write a policy pro forma, a brief or memo that clearly argues a policy position. He reserved a large auditorium-like classroom in the recently opened Keller Center.

Somebody should have found a bigger room.

“There was a huge turnout,” Chrisinger recalled. “People were lined up against the back of the auditorium. We just didn’t have enough space for everybody.”

In those early months, Chrisinger recalled presenting five or six workshops that drew similar, heavy turnouts. He logged 40-50 appointments a week with students.

The Writing Workshop was off to a running start. In the three years since Chrisinger was hired as director, it has continued to grow, innovate, and refine, while positioning itself as an increasingly important component of a Harris education.

Chrisinger served as a public policy instructor at Johns Hopkins University for six years and is the author of Public Policy Writing That Matters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), which made him the winner of the 2022 George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. He worked with Dean Katherine Baicker and school leadership to design programing for the Writing Workship. His priority: developing the workshop to focus on writing that moves people.

“I came from the school of thought that people are more persuaded by stories than they are by data points,” Chrisinger said. “That doesn't mean that data is not important. It just means that it has to be the prop. It can't be the main character.”

The Workshop teaches a combination of objective and subjective writing, narratives based on strong evidence and designed to meet the needs and expectations of the reader.

“Argumentation meets persuasion,” is how Chrisinger frames it.

As the resource continues to grow, it offers writing seminars, short skill-development videos, one-on-one coaching, and other comprehensive guidance to support students learning how to communicate evidence-based policy. The larger goal, Chrisinger said, is for every policy-related class in the country that requires a policy memo to direct students to the Harris Writing Workshop.

Support for students of different backgrounds

Lauren Manning, MPP’20, was among the first students to utilize what was then known as the Writing Program at Harris.

In her first year, she met with Chrisinger and teaching assistants to make sure she was on track while writing a policy memo for a class.

“I was confident in my writing skills,” she recalled, “but wanted to use that resource to make sure that I felt confident in the final products that I was delivering. It was very helpful.”

The experience also underscored that the program could help students of different backgrounds, Manning said, “whether it was people like me who just wanted some validation, people who were completely lost, or folks who had less experience with writing, even if they were confident in the technical side of things.”

In her second year, Manning became the head writing fellow and discovered another valuable aspect: peer-to-peer learning.

“As someone who’d been through the same coursework,” said Manning, now a Senior Behavior Change Advisor at Mercy Corps, “I, along with the other fellows, was able to recognize the mindset that students had adopted for the assignment they were working on.”

Chrisinger credits her with helping professionalize the writing program in its early days.

“She was our go-to teaching assistant,” he said, “both for me and the students. She’s an amazing listener and an empathetic coach,” who attained a “mastery” level of writing that helped Chrisinger realize he needed to recruit students who had strong writing, coaching, and teaching skills.

Finding reader resonance

In the early days, with immediate and strong demand for his services quite apparent, Chrisinger saw that Harris students had incredibly strong analytical skills but often came up short on communicating that analysis in ways that would resonate. The root of the issue, he said, was students’ inexperience with “the really hard thinking that you need to do before you start writing.”

He started teaching workshops on strategic communications thinking—how to organize evidence, how to make a key stakeholder map, how to analyze your audience and build a persona profile, even what morals and values form the foundation under your policy argument.

At the heart of his approach is an emphasis on the frame students use to discuss data and how people process information.

That belief in storytelling is an expanded, slightly controversial perspective on conventional policy analysis writing, which Chrisinger characterizes as analyzing data, presenting it to a client or the greater public, and letting them decide what to do with it.

Yet, he explained that his approach merely applies a writing strategy that has proven successful for centuries to public policy.

“This is stuff that journalists figured out a hundred years ago,” Chrisinger added, chuckling, “but it’s very slow on the uptake in public policy.

“There are tools we know work very well in creative nonfiction, in documentaries, in certain kinds of social media,” he added. “And there are things that turn people away. We’re constantly trying to glean insights from all that.”

That perspective made an impression on Ellie Vorhaben, MPP’22, who attended all the writing workshops offered when she enrolled at Harris in 2020. She worked with the writing fellows and then she enrolled in Chrisinger’s writing course the next spring.

She said she enjoyed the fellows’ methodology, coaching, and teaching, as well as their holistic view of writing.

“It really clarified a lot of the writing techniques I had gravitated toward naturally when I worked as an economist before coming to Harris,” said Vorhaben, executive editor of the Chicago Policy Review and, like Manning, a writing fellow. “You really have to focus on what your reader knows and what they want to get out of reading your piece. Working with David was very reader-focused: how do you address the needs of your reader and communicate with them in a way that’s going to resonate?”

Reinforcing her intuition to resonate with the reader and learning how to receive and give feedback in a constructive way are the two primary lessons she will take with her when she starts her position on Deloitte’s government and public services team after graduation, Vorhaben said.

Chrisinger said she received strong favorable student reviews during her time as a TA and co-authored an original white paper based on a nonprofit newsroom’s extensive survey. Chrisinger is planning to publish the paper later this year.

A program built from the ground up

Chrisinger began his career in 2010 as a communications analyst at the Government Accountability Office in Washington, DC.

Over the years, he consulted with researchers on government auditors, facilitated message development exercises, and wrote and edited reports and testimonies for the U.S. Congress. While performing that work and teaching at Johns Hopkins, he wrote the public policy book, a highly regarded volume that has been placed on syllabi for courses across the country, including at Harvard Kennedy School.

Then, in late 2018, a UChicago friend emailed him about a job opening to establish a formal writing program at Harris. He was intrigued and excited.

“It seemed, based on the position, that it was a chance to build a program from scratch how I thought it needed to be built,” Chrisinger recalled.

He started in his new position in February of 2019. His duties include directing the Persuasive Writing Credential Program, teaching policy writing courses and advising the Chicago Policy Review. He also advises students enrolled in the Education and Society Certificate Program and helps faculty members develop and evaluate writing-focused assignments.

In addition, Chrisinger teaches memoir writing for The War Horse , a nonprofit newsroom raising public awareness about military service, war, and its impact; contributed to the New York Times At War Column, and is a Logan Nonfiction Fellow. He has also authored two books: Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor’s Guide to Writing About Trauma (2021, Johns Hopkins University Press), and The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II (set for release on May 30, 2023, Penguin Press), which chronicles the life of renowned war correspondent Ernie Pyle; and Because Data Can’t Speak for Itself: A Practical Guide to Telling Persuasive Policy Stories (forthcoming in 2023, JHU Press), which he co-wrote with Lauren Brodsky of the Kennedy School.

A bigger, bolder future

Chrisinger continues to explore ways to use the Writing Workshop to help more students across Harris. In 2021 he hired academic writing specialist Isabeau Dasho, MAPH’17, and applied linguist Matthew Fleming as assistant directors to help him expand writing training opportunities to as many students as possible. The Harris Writing Workshop has also brought aboard three graduate assistants and eight students who will serve as Writing Fellows for the upcoming year.

He hopes to create issue-specific writing classes and continue growing the Chicago Policy Review. He also would like to add consulting to the menu of services the Writing Workshop provides.

Based on what he saw in his first week on the job and what he has experienced since, Chrisinger is confident demand will continue to be robust.

“We’re creating a much bigger footprint,” he said, “one that matches the size of the importance of the skill set that we’re teaching.”