Text: an original contemporary community-feature-style practice extract.

I was asked to make a public summary from the weather station’s monthly records. The first draft was pleasingly tidy: a row of figures, a line for the wettest day, a chart showing the month’s rise and fall. It looked as if the notebook had already made all the decisions for me.

At the meeting, people began recalling what the figures could not show. One month’s total had arrived in several short bursts; another had come in one long spell. The same amount on the page had meant different things to the allotment group waiting for rain and the volunteers who had checked the gauge. Nobody disputed the numbers. They disagreed about which comparison would help a reader understand them.

I took the chart home and put the daily pattern beside the monthly total. The summary grew less neat, but more honest about what it could tell us. When it went on the noticeboard, one volunteer added a question in the margin. I left it there. The records had not supplied a single finished story; the people who kept them had been making choices all along.

In this extract, the writer tries to show how a neat summary can hide the decisions behind it.