Social & Critical Psychology · Simplified
Five Ways to Write It Up
Nobody in this activity is lying. That is what makes it worth doing.
Two things this is not
It is not a word-frequency exercise. Nothing here depends on which words appear most often; what matters is the position an account makes available to the person it is about, and what that position permits. It is also not a claim that the events are made of language. The ledger of events is fixed, stays on screen throughout, and every account is compatible with all of it. Analysing how something is written up is not the same as saying that only the writing is real. R and the service are invented, and no real person, record or organisation is described.
The ledger
What happened, as agreed by everybody
Eight entries. No account below disputes any of them, and this list does not change at any point on this page.
Step 1 of 3
First, a prediction
Five accounts of those eight entries were written by different people for different purposes. Institutional write-ups do not just include or leave out an entry - they can also recode it as something else. Without looking, what kind of entry would you expect to be handled most inconsistently across the five: stated outright by some, recoded by others, left out altogether by the rest?
Step 2 of 3
One account at a time
Open an account, read it against the ledger above, and answer one question about it before the rest is shown.
Key terms
- Subject position
- The kind of person an account makes available to be. It is not a description of somebody's character; it is a place in a piece of writing that a person can be put in.
- What a position permits
- The actions that become obviously reasonable once somebody is in it, and the ones that stop being available.
- Authority to describe
- Who an account entitles to say what is really happening. It is rarely the person the account is about.
Step 3 of 3
All five together
The same eight events, five times. Read the last two columns.
| Account | Kind of person it produces | Next step it makes obvious | Who may say what is happening | How the hours reduction appears |
|---|
What this shows
The position decides the next step
Key idea: Every one of the five accounts is accurate, and each puts R somewhere different: a patient whose disagreement has become a symptom, an unmonitored risk, a member acting on a decision that was made about her, someone progressing towards independence, and a unit of expected step-down. Once she is in one of those positions the next step follows almost without anyone choosing it, which is what a subject position is for. Look at what that does to the letter she wrote in July. In one account it is evidence of limited insight, in another it is written feedback logged for the quarter, and in a third it is a letter that has not been answered. And then there is the entry that the five accounts handle three different ways. The hours were halved in April, before anything R did. Only the advocacy bulletin states that decision outright; the commissioning report recodes it as a reduced-hours model implemented on schedule; the rest have nowhere to put a decision that was not hers. What a discourse cannot say about anything other than the person is usually more consequential than what it says about the person.
This is not a ranking, and the case note and the risk register exist for reasons. A record that could not note declining attendance would be a bad record, and a safeguarding process that could not notice an unassessed setting would be a dangerous one. The recovery vocabulary is the sharpest case of all: it was fought for by service users precisely against the case-note position, and it is here because a vocabulary can do exactly what it was designed to do and still leave a service cut looking like a personal achievement. Two further cautions. The advocacy bulletin is not the neutral one either; its confidence that the assessment was in error is asserted rather than shown. And five accounts is a simplification of a file that would hold dozens, contradicting one another and shifting within a paragraph.
The longer version asks four questions of every account rather than one, tracks your answers across all five, and adds a closing exercise on rewriting an account to make a different next step obvious. It is at Discourse and Subject Position Laboratory in the main collection.