The Report-Writing Voice I Can't Turn Off

I write violation notices for a living. Somebody’s deck was built two feet into the setback, somebody’s furnace vent is routed wrong, somebody’s rental unit has a stairwell that doesn’t meet code anymore even though it met code the year it was built, and my job is to write it up in a way that holds up if the owner appeals. Findings, then citation, then remedy, then deadline. That structure is so deep in my head at this point that I catch myself trying to apply it to a board game review before I’ve even finished the first draft.

I’ve been thinking about this because I caught myself doing it mid-draft one night, before I’d even noticed the pattern had a name. I’d sit down to write about a game and instinctively want to open with the equivalent of a findings section, here’s what the box claims, here’s what I actually observed on inspection, here’s whether the claim and the observation line up. Naomi in the permits office pointed that out to me first, half joking, and now I have to learn to note it to myself before it happens again, because she said my drafts read like I’m about to fine the publisher. She’s not wrong. I’ve had to consciously edit the citation-voice back out of more than one review before it went up here, because a report and a review aren’t the same document even if my brain wants to treat them the same.

Where it actually helps, and I’ve made peace with this rather than fighting it, is in the specific-detail habit. Inspecting a building for a living means you don’t get to say “the wiring seemed off,” you have to say which outlet, which gauge, which section of code it violates. That same instinct is why I can’t write “the components felt cheap” in a review without immediately wanting to specify which components, which parts of the box, exactly what about them felt wrong. I think that’s made the reviews better, even if it means every draft goes through an extra pass where I’m hunting down my own vague adjectives the way I’d hunt down a vague complaint from a resident who calls in “something’s not right with my neighbor’s fence” and expects me to show up and just know.

The part I haven’t figured out how to turn off is the deadline instinct. Every violation notice I write has a remedy-by date attached to it, thirty days, sixty days, whatever the code section specifies, and some part of my head keeps waiting for a review to need one too, like there should be a date by which the publisher fixes the box art or the rules ambiguity gets addressed. There isn’t one, obviously. Nobody’s coming to reinspect Cloudspire’s rulebook in sixty days. But I notice the itch every time, the same way you notice a habit only once somebody else points it out to you, and now that I’ve written it down here I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. Deb reads most of these before I post them and the joke in our house now is that if a paragraph starts sounding like I’m about to cite someone, she flags it before Naomi has to.