In September the editorial team of the Parliament’s front page website was sent to media training with an experienced pro. He read our texts and than gave us a lashing. Being ripped to pieces is actually less painful, if the text in question does not have your name directly attached to it. It´s like writing with an invisibility cloak. And so we took a theoretical, albeit still masochistic approach, reading our texts critically as if they were written by someone else. 

Driven by the urge to please our readers, to be informative as well as entertaining kept us going. A little hiccup occurred when we were actually asked to say who our readers are. “The general public,” would be a good answer. “But why do we use eurospeak then?,” came as a swift reply. Nobody in “real life” talks about “plenary agendas” and the like. “Really?!?” was my first mental reaction, but I kept it for myself, pondering how much of a homo sapiens europeactus I had already become.

Well, being an editor of an institutional magazine is nevertheless a challenging task. Making a European perspective attractive to people who prefer to think locally is eventually mission impossible and will therefore never seize to demand creative thinking and lots of improvement in writing.

So writing with an invisibility cloak might not bring fame, but perhaps the satisfaction of not being perceived as “institutional” once I get all the abstract ways of thinking out of my texts. And if it should not work straight away … after the training is always before the training …