Simple, active and present
Jane Mace looks at minute taking and the spirit of Quaker business
Two years ago I began a study asking: how do Quakers and their clerks produce minutes? As time passed, the research broadened in scope and, a few months ago, I published a book on understandings of the divine, discipline, discernment and decision-making generally in Quaker Meetings for Worship for Business, with clerking and minute-writing as part of that. What about the original question? This piece offers an answer: namely, that our Quaker approach to producing minutes shows a commitment to our testimonies to simplicity and equality – and, as such, needs to be treasured.
Literacy
My interest in Quaker clerking started when I was doing research about scribes some twelve years ago. During this research, I had talked to letter-writers in prison, secretaries in offices, poets, officials, copyists – and then I sat in my first Quaker Meeting for Worship for Business. There I saw everyone in a Meeting waiting quietly while the clerk at the table found words to put their decision on paper. When she read out what she had found, all took a share in turning it into the finished text.
Ever since that day I have been thinking about the meanings that this way of producing writing may hold – and the social practice view of literacy that I brought with me seemed to offer some helpful insights. In this view, the focus is on literacy as something broader than a set of skills learned or not learned at school. For a long time that had been the usual idea – and, for many people, still is. But, sometime in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers began to describe how we make use of reading and writing in all sorts of ways for everyday activity. This showed people using different kinds of literacy as a means to achieve different kinds of purposes: from cooking a meal to finding a job, from acting as a court witness to participating in a sport, from getting married to advertising a meeting. In each of these situations, studies showed these purposes and contexts varying across time and place, people using different skills in the process and different values being implicit in these uses.
This social practice view of literacy offers the chance to see common uses of literacy with a sharper eye and to recognise that what seems a universal way of doing things here and now – for example, requiring written evidence that something has happened – in another era or culture would be inappropriate, or even ridiculous. It also reminds us that the assumed custom today of reading and writing silently and usually alone – with the stigma of illiteracy for those adults who do not find that easy – is a recent one; and that, far from being an ‘either-or’ set of skills, which individuals either do or do not possess, literacy is about social relationships – which may often be unequal.
Equality
In the case of Quaker Meetings for Worship for Business, the context of the reading and writing activity is the meeting of a religious organisation: and the purpose, the creation and recording of that organisation’s spirit-led decisions. In the current literacy practices of the Society, it is the process of creating the written record, rather than the written text itself, which is central to achieving that – and, as part of that process, these texts – and reports, letters and proposals brought to the group – are read aloud.
Silent and solitary reading and writing being the norm, this practice is rare. The reading aloud part of draft minutes has the practical aim of trying out a piece of writing with everyone having a part in it. The reason for reading aloud other papers is not quite so obvious – but, at any rate, has the benefit of including everyone. The practice may have once had a practical purpose, since among early Quakers, as among any group at the time, there would be many who could not have read on their own. We might also glimpse at another reason. With this apparent preference for the sound of the spoken voice over the look of the typed document, today, the practice of reading aloud might have something to do with the Quaker search for truth – to be found in the here-and-now experience of the spoken word. There is also the possibility that enabling a group to all read a text at the same time – if it is read out clearly enough – gives shape to the principle of equality – which, like simplicity, is also discernible in the approach to writing.
Simplicity
Ask a Quaker about how Quakers make decisions and the word ‘simple’ may not be the first one that they think of. The very title ‘Meeting for Worship for Business’ is a mouthful. The whole approach is tricky to learn, involving ways of doing things quite different to those of any other formal meetings.
From observation of the style and sentence structure of Quaker minutes, a commitment to simplicity seems pretty clear. In sharp contrast to minute-writing conventions elsewhere, Quakers write in the active voice. Instead of writing: ‘The issue of whether to organise an exhibition for this year’s Quaker week was considered’ the usual form is: ‘We considered whether to organise an exhibition for Quaker week’.
Similarly, while secular conventions of minute-writing produce sentences in the past tense, Quakers favour the present. Here is a minute in the usual convention:
The matter of the choice of paint for the gates has been considered.
It was appreciated that there has been a lot of work done by the Premises Committee and their first colour choice was agreed to.
Here, by contrast, is a Quaker version of the same:
We have considered the matter of the choice of paint for the gates.
We appreciate the work which the Premises Committee has done. We agree to accept their first choice.
There are two advantages of the second version: it is easier to read and it is clear. The reader knows who is doing the considering, appreciating and agreeing.
Invitation
Not all Quakers seem aware of our commitment to simple writing and some of us still cling to the impersonal, as in: ‘it is suggested that this should be referred to elders’ and ‘the Meeting did not come to a conclusion’ – forgetting the delight of keeping to our inherited style: ‘we agree to ask elders to explore this’ or ‘we could not find unity about that’. Similarly, in reading aloud, a reader all too often speaks low, head bowed over the page, so that the potential advantage of all present hearing the same text at the same time is lost: the Friend cannot be heard.
So this is the invitation to all of us at our next Meetings for Worship for Business. When reading out, keep the text brief, speak up and speak out. When supporting clerks while they write, give active silence. When they read out a draft minute, resist the temptation to ask for more words. If anything, ask for fewer. Consider that, when clerks draft long sentences and formal language, it may be from an anxiety to fulfil the perceived needs of the Meeting. Recognise that at the heart of our Quaker ways of decision-making is a spiritual effort. Nourish this; commit to the stillness; allow for words to find their own appeal. In short, join the search for a loving spirit in our business; and remember that clerking is a shared task, asking of those undertaking it no other qualifications than ‘the spiritual capacity for discernment and sensitivity to the Meeting’ (Quaker faith & practice 3.12).
Jane’s book God and decision-making: A Quaker approach is published by Quaker Books.
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