September 11, 2001, promised to be a busy Tuesday. I was running a few minutes late toward my office in the corporate communications department of American Airlines in Fort Worth, TX. It would be my last day as managing editor for employee publications, and there was a lot to accomplish before I moved full-time into a new position in the ITS department, developing and managing content for the soon-to-be-released employee communications extranet.

By the time I logged in to the system, the clock on my PC read 7:45 Central — and my screen froze. User volume was unusually high. I heard a colleague on the phone in the next office saying, "There's been an incident — we don't have details, but we think a small plane has crashed into the World Trade Center."

Twenty minutes later, we knew the plane wasn't small, and we knew it was one of ours. Flight 11. The rest of that day's events unfolded quickly and surreally. Two of our planes were down, two of United's. The entire domestic air fleet was grounded. Lost were more than two dozen crew and other employees, hundreds of passengers, and thousands of innocent victims.

I walked down to the small meeting room we had dubbed the "strategy suite" and into a cacophony of conversations. My boss caught my eye, and said, "Get the word out to employees." That meant telling the more than 125,000 employees of American Airlines, American Eagle and TWA what had happened. And what had happened, anyway? We didn't really know yet. Fortunately, as the details trickled in, I was able to settle myself down enough to focus on some lessons learned nearly two decades ago.

Telling the story
Time spent in college and postgraduate classrooms as both student and teacher, and more than a decade in various newsrooms as both writer and editor, have honed my writing skills. But when I suddenly had to "get the word out" regarding the single greatest loss of life on American soil since the Civil War, I returned to the basics I learned at St. John's Jesuit High School in Toledo, OH.

Working for the school newspaper, I learned the first lesson of professional communications: "You are not the story. The story is the story." Sounds obvious, but many writers are so in love with their own words, their own cleverness, that the story — what the reader really wants to know — becomes secondary.

In high school English classes, I learned two more writing lessons. One was "You can tell good writing — it's when you know the writer is telling the truth." Again, sounds obvious. But especially in light of the recent corporate accounting scandals, we know that too many companies are so concerned with spinning a story to "protect" the public (or its employees, or its reputation, or worst of all, its assets) that the truth becomes secondary, even illusory.

The other lesson I learned back then was "Language is more than vocabulary — it represents the nuances of a culture. We tend to forget that English wasn't the only language in the world and America is among the youngest of cultures. Working now an international company with customers in more than 100 countries, I realize now that last lesson may have been the most important of all. The words we would use to tell this story from our Fort Worth headquarters needed careful examination before being passed on systemwide.

As I walked back to my desk, mentally drafting the first real announcement to be sent out to our thousands of management-level employees all over the world, I envisioned the words "in four separate but almost certainly related incidents ..."

Just then, the same voice that has s been in my head for 20 years every time I write the word separate admonished, "Gentlemen, there is A RAT in separate!" Gallows humor? No — just the kind of lifelong habit of accuracy that helped me focus on the assignment, regardless of circumstances.

And that's another lesson I learned in school: "Don't cut corners." Take great pains with te details when you're writing under pressure; accuracy is a sign that at least the communications are under control.

These four seemingly simple rules for writing are worth remembering any time, but especially in times of crisis when tempers flare and emotions run high:

• Remember that the story is the story.
• Trust your readers enough to tell them the truth.
• Look for problematic wording, given readers with differing cultural backgrounds.
• Guard against inaccuracies, despite the rush of events.

One of the worst moments of the following months — I remember becoming physically ill as I hit "send" to broadcast the e-mail message — was the official announcement regarding the painful but necessary decision to cut our corporate workforce by some 20 percent. Managers, already grieving, were now responsible for at least temporarily relieving thousands of their co-workers of their livelihood.

Good Words Against Impossible Odds NOTE: This first commentary in Mick Doherty's "Good Words" e-mail campaign to American Airlines employees (September 24, 2001) acted as an invitation for them to provide their own sometimes very personal contributions to "the story." As we head into what our CEO Don Carty has publicly acknowledged will be "still another difficult week at American Airlines," let's not forget how often those in our industry have been told what they can't do ... and how wrong those nay-sayers have been. Lord Kelvin, president of Royal Society and a brilliant scientist who developed the absolute scale of temperature which bears his name, proclaimed in 1895 that, simply put, "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." Perhaps Lord Kelvin can be forgiven, since we were still eight years away from Kitty Hawk ... But let's go now to an editorial in The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") from December 10, 1903: "We hope that Professor Langley [the subject of the story and a colleague of Alexander Graham Bell] will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved in further air experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly." The Wright Brothers took off exactly a week later: December 17, 1903. The scientific community and the press still weren't satisfied, the flying-machine claims of Wilbur and Orville Wright were derided and dismissed as a hoax by publications including Scientific American and The New York Herald, as well as the US Army and most American scientists for the better part of the next five years. In spite of scores of public demonstrations, affidavits from local dignitaries, and photographs of themselves flying, the very idea of heavier-than-air flying machines was simply too ludicrous to believe. As an industry facing what may seem like impossible odds, it's never a bad idea to look back and realize that the very existence of the aviation industry was based on overcoming impossible odds. And we'll do it again. —MD

But I was also overwhelmed to read the hundreds of e-mails and faxes that came into my office with prayers, poems, and support from our customers, fellow workers in the airline industry worldwide, and concerned well-wishers around the globe. So I began interspersing the consistently somber bulletins that I was obligated to send with positive commentary called "Good Words" (see the sidebar for an example).

That may seem sentimental or even self-serving to you, trust me: These collections of "Good Words" generated a great deal of feedback from employees. They welcomed the chance to support each other in the midst of tragedy and conflict. Why did that matter? Phrased as a corrolary to the four earlier lessons:

• Allow employee reactions to become part of the story.

In short, the "Good Words" vehicle created a positive news loop when little else was of comfort.

Now, as we approach the first anniversary of that awful Tuesday morning, I'm drawn to the words of a writer who knew at an early age about surviving — and writing — in a time of personal and national crisis. The Diary of Anne Frank has become a classic at least in part because readers know she's telling the truth:

"When I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more."