A hundred words, in a hand they can read

For twenty years I wrote captions for newspapers, and the rule of a caption is that it must be true, short, and useful to someone who has not seen the picture. A consumer statement under § 1681i(b) is a caption. One hundred words, attached to a disputed item, read by a lender who has not seen your life.

Jenavieve wrote in June about writing it in your own voice, and she is right that a statement that sounds like a form is ignored like a form. Calvin wrote last week about how to file it. I want to talk about what it is for, because my daughter, who is a wonderful writer, wrote hers in 2023 and it was a hundred words of feeling. Feeling is not caption.

The lender reading your statement is trying to decide one thing: whether the item next to it means what it appears to mean. Your hundred words either help with that decision or they do not. So the statement does three jobs, in order, and each gets about a sentence:

What the item is, in their language. "Account ending 4417, reported as a 60-day late in March 2022."

What is true about it, with a fact they could check. "The March payment was made on the 3rd by check, cleared on the 8th; the furnisher's own statement for April shows no past-due balance."

What the reader should do with that. "The bureau verified the item; the statement and cleared check are available on request."

That is sixty words. The remaining forty are for silence.

Now the three things a statement must never do, from a woman who has read a great many captions:

It must not argue. "The bureau has repeatedly refused to correct this obvious error" tells the lender you are angry, and lenders are not persuaded by anger; they are persuaded by dates.

It must not explain the circumstances of your life. The hospital, the divorce, the winter your husband was ill. I understand the impulse. I have lived the winters. A lender cannot weigh them, and a statement that asks them to is a statement that asks them to look away from the file, which is the one thing they cannot do.

It must not promise. "This will never happen again" is not a fact, and the file is a record of facts.

Jenavieve rewrote hers after I sent her this, cut sixty-two words, and the new one is better. She says I am editing her the way I edited her school essays. Yes. I was right then, too.

The principle: a caption serves the reader, not the photographer. Your hundred words are for the person deciding, and everything in them should make deciding easier.

Write it, count it, cut a third, and read it aloud to someone who does not know the story. If they understand it, send it.