Military writing

I've heard it said that literature is about painting a picture from an instant, whereas journalism sums up those thousand words into one sentence. Those are the paradigms I've worked with ever since I worked for University of Hawaii newspaper 14 years ago.

Military writing differs from both, and I've only recently started getting the hang of it. While in journalism you have the "inverted pyramid" style of descriptive writing and some analysis, military writing -- especially orders -- has a distinct format to it. The background information is up front, but the stuff you really want to know, the Tasks to Subordinate Units, is buried in the middle.

Like me, if you don't know what you're looking for, you'll get lost in the intelligence portion and give up.

For whatever reason, this was hard for me to grasp even as recently as while I was in CLC3. I'm certain that, if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have done a much better job on the ICOS than I did.