There was a pre-internet time when researching a topic used to be difficult precisely because information was so hard to come by. Today, the challenge is often the reverse: how to deal with information overload.
When you’re writing a document and your source material comes to fifty-odd pages, how do you make sense of it all, cut through the noise and find the nuggets of content that you need to create and support your argument?
It turns out that being able to process such large amounts of background information is an increasingly important requirement in today’s workplace. The recent Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report (2018) says that even data and analytics jobs now require skills such as writing (obviously!), but also problem-solving, teamwork and being able research effectively.
The good news is that our Structured Writing Method, is not only great for writing, but it’s also an excellent tool to help problem-solving and teamwork. Here, though, I’m just going to look at the powerful techniques that it teaches based upon Microsoft Word’s Outline View that enable researchers to create the structure for new documents, and enables them to very efficiently capture, deconstruct and finally reconstruct material from other documents.
Creating order with Outline View
Start by pasting your source material, be it documents – or selections of documents – into your draft document. As you do this, strip out the formatting as this will help you avoid also sorts of aesthetically challenging problems later on.
Next, switching to Outline View, add meaningful headings wherever you see fit. You’ve got to use your common sense here, but ideally these will match the sections of the document that you’re trying to produce.
This, then, is where you do most of your thinking – and you do it all by ordering, reordering and rewriting the headers.
This ‘first pass’ work can be done very rapidly. You don’t need to read every word – this is simply a kind of ‘content triage’. As you do this you’ll make quick value judgements about chunks of text, assessing them to be:
- Great
Write a quick header about why and move on. - Maybe
Write a header starting with a question mark, perhaps? - Rubbish
This could be most of your document!
When I do this I tend to be able to get rid of two thirds of the document into the ‘rubbish’ category within five or ten minutes – even if I’m going through dozens of pages of source material. It’s that quick.
Now is the time to return to what survives and do a second, more thorough pass at outlining. If you’ve got a structure of the document you are working towards, then you simply move everything to where it will eventually be needed. Alternatively, if you don’t know what you want to write because you don’t know what the source material actually says, then use this process to read through your content and discover what’s there. Group headings according to sensible themes and you will soon end up with what we call a ‘thematic reconstruction’ of the source material.
Either way, you need to end up with the structure of your final document. Work in Outline View and play around with the headers and the orders. Get to a point where you can read the entire document – and understand the flow of the argument and even the supporting content within each section – simply by looking at the document outline.
When this job is done you’re ready to do the final part of writing – crafting.
A document blueprint
Before you start, however, you might want to share your thinking with your colleagues. You have, after all, a complete blueprint of the document you plan to write. If colleagues are going to want to add more information, or change the emphasis of the final document, now is the perfect time to ask for that input. You want that before you write and not after! You can see how creating a document in this way is perfect for enhancing collaboration.
When you’ve got the green light, everything you need will be there, previously thought about, in exactly the right place. And if you’ve done this in a collaborative way, you will know already that your colleagues will be pleased with your work because you will already have included them in the development of the detailed structure.
Paul Ayling is the founder and CEO of Writing Machine.
Read more about the Structured Writing Method
The full Structured Writing Method is available to study at any time via Writing Machine Academy’s online platform, which is accessible over a range of mobile devices. What’s more, with our SaaS pricing, it is now a very affordable option to give professional quality writing training to everybody within an organisation.
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