Truth 11. Forget outlines—organize your thinking

In school, your teachers probably made you create a careful outline of your essays and papers before writing. Here’s the problem: If you haven’t thought through your content and made the decisions suggested in the previous chapters, you’ll find it horrendously hard to organize the material.

But once you’ve thought about goal, audience, and mapping your content, organizing your piece logically becomes a snap.

Suppose you’re writing a memo to introduce your staff to a new system for reporting their work hours.

• Goal—To minimize grumbling and objections to a new system and have staff accept the new way of doing things with reasonable cheerfulness, as well as understand the basics of what they’ll have to do.

• Audience—One you know well (your staff), and their responses probably run the gamut from those comfortable with change to active resistors.

• Tone—“Friendly formal” seems best.

• Content mapping—What do you need to say to this audience to get what you want?

1. Explain the need for a new system briefly.

2. Announce the start date.

3. Show how it works in practical terms.

4. Mention any advantages the new system might hold for the staff.

5. Make sure they understand that they have no choice.

6. Offer a way for them to get answers to any questions they may have.

7. Mention any negative results if they don’t follow the new system.

You know what needs to be communicated. So all you have to do is organize it—or maybe just check to see whether you’re satisfied with the organization that’s fallen into place.

You can make choices about what order to put things in, but it wouldn’t be logical to start with #3—which such memos often do—because readers won’t know why they should care about a new system if they don’t know that they must use it.

What’s your best opening? A clear statement announcing the new system and starting date. What’s a good ending? The offer to entertain questions lets you end on a positive note. The middle offers some choice—#3 and #4 could be interchanged. You can move #5, #6, and #7 around, but introducing a threat earlier may get some readers’ backs up.

Try your hand at writing the memo before looking at our version.

Dear Staff Members:

As of September 1, we’ll all be using a new system for reporting our time. Here’s how it works.

At the beginning of each week, you’ll get an e-mailed form (etc., as clearly and briefly as possible).

The new system will give you your paychecks and expense reimbursements two or three days faster because Payroll can process records more quickly when the information is clear.

We’ll meet briefly to go over the process on Monday at 10 a.m. in the conference room. Ask any questions about it then, and follow up with me personally if necessary. It’s important to get this right because your check won’t be issued if you don’t follow through properly.

Thanks for handling this change efficiently.—Jim

Note that we added a few things to the plan when we came to the actual writing: announcing the meeting, and the “thanks” at the end. Why? Because neither idea had occurred to us before. As we wrote the simple memo, the meeting seemed like a good way to go in the circumstances outlined, and the closing carries both conviction that the new rules will be followed and a touch of appreciation for accepting procedural change (which, face it, nobody likes).

When the “technical” part of an e-mail needs to be long or complicated, it might better be delivered as an attachment; or you can make it the final section of the e-mail and head it clearly (How to Use the System). Otherwise, readers may get lost in the details and miss important parts of your message.

Writing helps you think

Here’s something else that is important about writing effectively when you give it a chance: What you write reveals the quality of your thinking. When you really understand what you’re writing about, you can describe it clearly. If Jim describes the new system but is hazy about how it works, that will show up in his memo.

To reverse the idea, consider that the reason so much bad writing exists is probably because there’s so much bad thinking.

This is all too true in today’s business world. Fuzzy, confused writing results from fuzzy, confused thinking. Overinflated claims for a person, product, or organization backed by little or no evidence—what we call “empty rhetoric”—lacks substance and fools no one.

In fact, if you want to be sure you understand a new product, service, or technical procedure, try writing about it (or teaching it to someone else). When you hit gaps in your knowledge or thinking, take the time to remedy them. You can do research, ask a colleague, think some more, review your notes: whatever it takes. Most writers we know have one eye on their writing, the other on a search engine as they work so that they can look up terms and references they don’t understand.

You can’t fake good writing because it’s built on good thinking. But take the trouble to try to write well, and the process will lead you back to your thinking. Improve your thinking, and you’ll write better—a win-win situation.

Many professionals—from scientists to artists to business leaders—use writing as a way of crystallizing their thinking. Attempting to articulate ideas helps you figure out what you know and what you don’t know, and points up what you need to find out.

With relatively short documents, you can choose to just write it all down organically and see what you’ve got. If you followed the first four steps of our strategy, your material will probably be reasonably organized. Then you can take a closer look and start shifting around sentences, paragraphs, and sections to improve the logical flow of your ideas, facts, and arguments.