Truth 12. How to organize is a personal choice

While mapping the content leads you to a natural organization for relatively short and simple kinds of writing—memos, letters, and such—longer and more complicated materials make organizing more of a challenge.

Here are some approaches professional writers use to organize their work when it’s complex. These approaches can be adapted for proposals, reports, articles, and other writing projects where you have a substantial amount of information to pull into shape. Some approaches give you ways to build in the organization early on, saving you lots of time later:

1. Divide and conquer—List your major project components that are likely to make up sections in the final document, and give each a separate piece of “paper” (a file) on your computer. For example, if you’re assigned to assemble a company history, you might have sections such as Founding and Early History, Important People, Product Development, Current Financial Picture, and so on. Then, as you’re assembling information, add the relevant information to the appropriate page or file. Thanks to the computer, you can shuffle the pieces around after collecting them, too. People used to do this on index cards—and some still do—so try that if you’re a tactile learner.

2. Create a master list—Skim your pile of raws notes and make a list of the most important ideas or elements. Review the list and see what order seems most logical and rearrange as necessary. Then for each idea or element, find the backup information in your material and add it in directly under the right heading.

3. Color code—Print out your mass of material and go through it with colored markers, matching up the color with a section—green for financial information, for example. You can also mark a piece for great quotes, possible leads, endings, and more so that they’re easy to find later. You can color code on your computer screen, too, but because it’s hard to do a lot of reading on screen, many people prefer to work with printouts.

4. Bubble it—Some of us learned this method in school. It works best with pen and paper. Put each major idea on paper with a circle around it, leaving plenty of room among the circles. Then draw lines between the circles of those ideas that connect, or logically follow, the other. This gets messy, but you can see the whole complicated picture on one sheet. If you’re a visual thinker, it might be the technique for you. The Visual Thesaurus (www.visualthesaurus.com) is an example of this technique. Thinkmap (www.thinkmap.com) describes it as creating “word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words.”

5. Don’t look now—Without referring to your massive pile of notes, and preferably after you haven’t looked through it for a day or so, think about what comes to your mind as important (or interesting) about the information you’ve collected. Many of us find our subconscious has been hard at work figuring this out while we weren’t actively focused on the project. Write down the points that occur to you, and then review your material for backup in each category.

6. Tell somebody—Suppose you’re reporting on a research project. Ask yourself, what would I say if X (my boss, girlfriend, cubemate, whoever) asked me why I did this, why does it matter, what did I find? Your answer gives you the kernel of the report and a structure that works.

7. Let your computer do more of the work—There is a lot of project management software available, ranging from open source desktop and Web-based programs to proprietary programs for desktops and the Web. They vary in difficulty and in the learning curve required to use them. Many are collaborative, which means you can work with others who are not sitting next to you but are continents away.

Try some of these systems out and see if they help. If not, don’t use them—they are not ends in themselves. Everyone works differently, and there’s never only one way to get where you want. Thanks to modern technology, the tools for organizing, reorganizing, shifting material, and making big changes are easy to use.

We won’t talk in detail about editing yet, because we have to get the words down first. But here’s a liberating thought: You’re never—well, hardly ever—stuck with your initial version. In fact, writers label that version “the first draft,” then review it to see what’s not working, and fix it.

That means you can experiment with your first draft and not get hung up on details and missing pieces. Will you have to schedule time for editing a major writing project? Yes, but ultimately, you can get the work done with surprising efficiency.