Helping somebody with their letter
What you can take from this site, and the rule that never changes when you write for somebody else.
Public scribes, librarians, social workers, digital-inclusion staff, associations
The same site, a different use
The rest of this site speaks to the person who has a letter to write. This page speaks to whoever is helping them: a public scribe, a library, a social service, an association, a digital-inclusion worker.
You take the same site, the same templates, the same method. But writing a letter for somebody else is not writing a letter for yourself, and that difference has concrete consequences, set out below.
What you can take
Something solid, not a promise
Nothing here is reserved for individual use. What you can take is written once and for all in a licence, not in a tolerance that could change its mind.
What is yours, as of now
- The 15 letter templates, under the CC BY 4.0 licence: to copy, to adapt, to fold into a guide or a training course, including a paid one.
- The open data of the collection, in JSON, to query or reuse in another tool.
- Every page of the site, printable as it stands, for a workshop or a reception desk.
- The whole site, usable offline once opened: a library terminal with no stable network can work with it.
- The CC BY 4.0 licence, in detail what it allows exactly, attribution requirement included
- The site offline what works with no network, and how to install it
What changes
They are the one signing, so they are the one who has to understand
Writing for somebody else is not writing the same letter faster. You may already know the procedure, you may choose the words more surely: none of that changes who signs, and who answers for what is written.
The person signing is the one putting their request forward. Before it goes, they therefore have to understand what they are asking for and what they are committing to, not approve it with a quick word.
An excellent letter the person does not understand does them a poor service, signed or not.
Before sending, in this order
- Read the whole letter back to them, never just a summary of what it says.
- Explain what it asks for and what sending it commits them to.
- Never sign in their place, even if they ask you to in order to save time.
- Leave them the copy of the letter and the proof of sending: those are theirs, not yours.
In a session
They hold the keyboard, you ask the questions
A good session is not one where you fill in the fields while they watch. It is one where they write, as much as they can, and you ask the question the next field is waiting for.
The method on this site is set out precisely as questions, not as official jargon: who decides, what happened, what is being asked for. Your part is to guide those questions and to check that each answer stands up, not to word it for them when they can word it themselves.
When they really cannot type themselves, you can write for them. The rule above then applies in full: they read it back, they understand it, they sign it.
Three pages to prepare a session, and to hold the line.
- The method, move by move
- Open the workshop with them
- This is not a lawyer the limit holds for you as much as for the site: you are no more a lawyer than it is