Five surprising ways the Structured Writing Method can improve your business

Writing is always amongst the most important soft skills that employers are seeking to develop. What is not often realised is the clear link between structured writing and skills such as researching, complex problem-solving, and teamwork. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the extent to which structured writing can improve productivity and even the bottom line.

Whatever your job and whatever you write – from sales emails to research reports, internal communications to multi-million dollar tenders – training in the Structured Writing Method™ will certainly make you a better communicator. It makes writing more compelling, more concise and more professional.

But that is only the beginning.

By breaking down the intellectual processes needed to write effectively into ‘objective setting’, ‘messaging’, ‘structuring’ and ‘crafting’, the Structured Writing Method can transform the way people think and work as well as write.

Here are five key business impacts you might not have expected:

1. The Structured Writing Method improves … complex problem solving
Following the Structured Writing Method, writing becomes an exercise in finding an effective solution to a recognised problem or challenge. It means developing the skill of truly understanding your audience and your objective, and then structuring a written solution designed to fulfil a specific need. Becoming a better writer, in other words, means becoming a better problem solver.

2. The Structured Writing Method improves … research
The Structured Writing Method teaches powerful techniques based upon Microsoft Word’s Outline View that not only enable researchers to create the structure for new documents, but also enables them to capture, deconstruct and finally reconstruct material from other documents. Research becomes more focused and very much more efficient.

3. The Structured Writing Method improves …team working and collaboration
For us, writing is not always something that happens in isolation, but is often the result of people working effectively together to achieve a recognised objective.  The method teaches processes, typically involving creating shareable editorial structures and storyboards, that can be particularly transformative when teams are collaborating on documents such as bids, tenders, marketing materials and internal reports.

4. The Structured Writing Method improves …productivity and time management
The Structured Writing Method breaks document creation into a series of tasks that mean that writing – or ‘crafting’ as we call it in the method – becomes the very last thing you do. That’s why writing in a structured way can reduce the need for revisions and rewrites; it also means outline structures can be debated and signed off before any crafting has been done. For companies that are looking to work more productively and use time more effectively, the Structured Writing Method has a lot to offer.

5.  The Structured Writing Method improves …the bottom line
Some documents impact the bottom line of a business. These include bid and tender documents, sales and marketing materials, and pre-sales correspondence. We have helped many bid and sales teams to use our Structured Writing Method to write proposals that are inherently more compelling and competitive. The commercial benefits to organisations that are able to improve the writing capabilities of their marketing, sales and bid teams are clear.