As every middle schooler knows, the structure of your writing can matter a great deal. It also matters in oral/visual presentations and generally anytime you have the opportunity to direct an audience's attention.
Good structure can make information easier to digest by chunking it appropriately, easier to scan by having good markers, reduce cognitive load by reusing known templates and patterns, and generally make you more effective in getting your ideas across.
This post was originally authored last year, when AI platforms were less popular than they are today. These days, there's certainly a fair bit of this that can be handled by them with the right prompting. That said, I think it's still useful to put these sort of things down, again because the repeatability matters quite a bit, as well as understanding what is it that you're trying to accomplish.
Common structures
- What / Why / Who / When / How is a classic structure to explain multiple aspects of a situation. Unless included as an explicit, very short segment, it's more often useful as a list to check that information is included, because it doesn't leave as much room for prioritization or managing complexity with cross-cutting concerns.
- Beginning, middle, end is the classic story structure. Other than keeping it chronologically ordered, scoped and helping with transitions, I don't find a lot of value in this mental model.
- Steady state, challenge, failures, success, lesson is another classic structure, an abridged version of the Hero's Journey perhaps. It helps make the lesson memorable, to give out warnings of problems and failure points, and to act as a more inspiring we can overcome obstacles story.
Special sections
- TL;DR - too long, didn't read - especially when writing for a busy audience, a summary callout at the top is worth writing up.
- Call to action - this should come across clearly and in general you want to have something valuable people can do in return for consuming your message.
- References or resources - typically a list of links or references to sources and additional information with more background or details.
Happy writing!
Tags:
management
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