Audience

• Effective professional writers tailor their writing to a particular audience. This tailoring helps to make decisions about both content and writing style. While all criminal justice professionals write about criminal incidents, they do so for different audiences. Police officers, for example, write incident reports which are used by prosecutors to make decisions about proceeding with indictments and later by the courts as evidence. A police officer who wants to write effectively, needs to consider that his audience will consist of legal professionals. These professionals will not be interested in a police officer's personal opinion because it is irrelevant in the legal context so the report should be objectively written -- stick to the facts.
  
  

Purpose

• Effective professional writers also tailor their writing to a particular purpose. A probation officer who is writing a pre-sentence report for a judge, for example, will recognize that the purpose of the report is to recommend a sentence for a particular offender. This recommendation cannot however, stand alone, it needs context. An effective pre-sentence report will also contain details about the offender, victim and the crime to set a context to assist the judge in making a decision about the appropriate sentence.
  
  

Use

• Effective professional writers will produce a product that is utilitarian; it should be clear, consistent and thorough. Judges who write effective decisions in criminal cases, for example, ensure the smooth operation of the criminal justice system. Clear, consistent and thorough decisions means lawyers can clearly extract the judge's meaning for use in future cases.
  
  

Key Qualities of Effective Writing

• Good quality professional writing is logically organized and presented. For criminal justice professionals, this typically means writing in chronological order with clear statements of factual events in an active voice. The presentation should contain clear headings to help the reader navigate to pertinent sections. The style and tone of the vocabulary should be tailored to the audience. For example, a parole officer writing a letter to a victim of a crime explaining why an offender has been released will use less "legalese or law speak" than the officer would in a report to the parole board making recommendations about appropriate parole conditions. Finally, a basic principle of all good writing is that spelling, punctuation and grammar must be impeccable.