We like to believe that a message is complete when it leaves our desk, polished and approved and sent, but at that moment it is only half written. The other half is written by the reader, in a context we do not control and with associations we never chose, and it is that second half, not ours, that decides what the message ends up meaning. I call the distance between the two halves the reading gap, and this newsletter will spend its time inside it, one real case at a time.
The first case is an old one, and I have chosen it for exactly that reason. Time has removed the noise around it, and what remains is the mechanism.
The word was accurate, and that was the problem
In April 2017 a passenger on United Airlines flight 3411, from Chicago to Louisville, refused to give up his seat so that crew members could fly, and airport security officers dragged him off the plane. Other passengers filmed it, and within hours the footage was everywhere. United’s chief executive, Oscar Munoz, responded with a statement in which he apologised “for having to re-accommodate these customers.”
A month earlier, on 17 March, PRWeek had named Munoz its Communicator of the Year.
We should be fair to the word before we judge it. Inside an airline, “re-accommodate” is not an evasion. It is a precise operational term for moving a passenger from one flight to another, the kind of word that legal teams approve because it describes a procedure without admitting anything beyond it. Read from inside the building, the sentence was careful, measured and correct.
But nobody outside the building read it that way. The audience had already seen the video before they saw the statement, and so they read the word against the image of a man being pulled down an aisle. In that light a technical term turned into a euphemism laid over force, and the sentence acquired a meaning its author never wrote: that the company was protecting its procedure rather than the person. What the organisation said was a description of a process. What the audience read was an alibi.
How does an award-winning communicator choose that word?
This is the question worth sitting with, because the easy answer (that Munoz or his team were careless) explains nothing. The people who drafted that statement were experienced professionals, and their mistake was not a lack of skill. It came from where they were standing.
The longer we work inside an organisation, the more its vocabulary starts to sound neutral to us. Words that our colleagues use every day stop carrying any colour, and we lose the ability to hear them the way a stranger would. We cannot simply decide to forget what we know, and so we write sentences that are perfectly clear to everyone who shares our context and strangely cold to everyone who does not. The more senior and the more fluent we become, the wider this gap tends to grow, which is why it catches the best communicators more often than the worst.
The story did not end with the first statement, and what followed confirms the pattern. An internal email from Munoz to employees, which soon leaked, described the passenger as “disruptive and belligerent” and defended the staff. Read inside the company, it was a leader standing by his people. Read outside, it was a chief executive blaming the man in the video. Only days later, and after a third statement, did United issue the kind of unreserved apology that the public had been waiting for from the start. By then the apology was no longer being read as an apology. It was being read as a retreat.
Warmer words are not the answer
The natural conclusion is that the fix lies in better writing, softer language and a more human tone. There is something to this, and a warmer first statement would certainly have done less damage. But warmth written from inside the organisation has its own reading gap, because an audience that already distrusts us reads sudden warmth as performance. Better words chosen from the wrong starting point still land in the wrong place.
The real fix is a change of order rather than a change of style. Most statements are written outwards, from what the organisation wants to say towards the audience. Messages that survive are written in the opposite direction, starting from what the audience has already seen and believes and working back towards what the organisation can honestly say into that space. United’s audience had seen the video, and any statement that did not begin from that image was going to be read against it.
In practice this means asking two questions before any important message goes out. What has my audience already seen or heard about this before my words reach them? And which of my words means something different to them than it means to me? Neither question requires talent. Both require the discipline to step outside the building before we start to write.
The half we do not write
Every organisation, sooner or later, sends a sentence like “re-accommodate” into the world, a sentence that is correct, approved and fatally incomplete. The question is not whether our audience will finish our messages for us, because they always will. The question is whether we have already read them through their eyes before we press send.
Munoz’s statement contained only a few words, and the public needed less than a day to finish writing it.