Introduction to Intelligence Studies244
Identifying Agents
Providing clarity about agents makes a decision-maker’s job easier. Consider
the following sentence:
To get from the United States to France, an airplane must be own.
is sentence starts with an innitive—“to get.” Unfortunately for the
reader, the sentence does not name an actor. Such an omission makes the
sentence sound terribly theoretical and abstract; this is a sentence with gen-
eralized advice directed toward no one. To make this a better sentence, the
writer should identify an agent:
To get from the United States to France, you must y on an airplane.
e identication of the actor—you—makes for a better sentence because
the reader now knows the person to whom the sentence refers. ...