№ 11The Faculty
Hannah Sieghart.
Communications Adviser, Sieghart Whelan, communications practice.
On the senior letter, plain prose, and writing under real pressure.
Plain prose is not the absence of style. It is the moment a senior writer stops performing and starts saying what they mean.
The work
Hannah runs Sieghart Whelan, a small communications practice she founded with Padraig Whelan in 2023, that takes one major engagement at a time and turns down the rest. She advises chief executives and chairs on the things they have to write themselves: shareholder letters, board memos, regulator submissions, and the kind of internal communication that arrives in an inbox the morning after a very bad day. She writes a fortnightly note for about two hundred senior comms directors. She runs the Speak Plainly day in November and the Communication Under Pressure masterclass in October.
Background
Hannah came up through corporate communications across the long decade in which the FTSE 100 was learning to write, publicly, about things it had previously preferred to write privately. She joined her first FTSE 100 communications team in 1998 as a third-year analyst, ran a sector desk through the financial crisis, and was made Group Communications Director of a large industrial conglomerate in 2011. She moved to a consumer goods group in 2016 and stayed there until the end of 2022. Both moves were chosen, not offered.
The consumer goods years were the ones that taught her the work. The chief executive left through a slow corporate scandal that took eighteen months from first whisper to final letter. Hannah drafted the shareholder communications on every step of that arc and keeps the redlined originals in a folder she will occasionally show, with permission and pseudonyms, to the masterclass attendees who are doing the same kind of work.
Signature contribution
Hannah is known, inside the small set of senior practitioners who write their own letters, for the discipline of reading the draft aloud. The rule is simple and uncomfortable. After the second draft of any senior letter, she reads it aloud at speaking volume in an empty office. If the third sentence is hedged, she tears the draft up. If the seventh sentence is the kind of sentence a committee would write, she tears the draft up. The objective is not literary; the objective is that the letter sound, on the page, like the chief executive speaking honestly to an adult.
She is also known for the bi-line work with Padraig Whelan: a four-day masterclass on senior writing that they have been running together since 2021. The masterclass has had two hundred and eighteen graduates as of the end of 2025. The waiting list runs to about a year. Of those graduates, eighty-one have written, in writing, that the practice has changed how they spend their Sunday afternoons.
In practice
On any week in October Hannah is on the phone in fifteen-minute slots, four times a day, to a chief executive who has not slept. She does not write the executive’s communications for them. She asks for the draft by email, within the hour, marks it up by hand, photographs the page, and sends the photograph back. The whole exchange takes ninety minutes. The senior executive learns to write under real pressure because the alternative — Hannah writing it for them and them signing it — produces nothing they could repeat the next time the phone rings on a Sunday.
Read your draft aloud in an empty room. If you would be embarrassed to read the third sentence aloud, the third sentence is what you actually need to fix.
Outside the work
She lives in Bath, walks the Kennet and Avon canal towpath most weekends with a small white terrier, and is married to a Times sub-editor who she will not name in print. She reads, mostly, the long diaries of nineteenth-century editors and the kind of biography that takes a decade to write. She is the only member of the faculty who keeps, on her desk, a fountain pen given to her by a reader.
The senior letter has three readers. Most people write it for the first one. The career is judged by the third, reading it five years later.