By Dana P Skopal, PhD

It’s a new year and no doubt you are doing a lot of writing and possibly even more reading. Our last blog looked at planning, persuading and writing. Already this year we have been asked in our workshops about how to unjumble information and order it coherently for the reader. Alas, there is no simple answer.

Ordering or organising your information entails several steps as well as going through the questions a reader may ask. The reader wants to know what this is about, why this is important and what do they need to do with the information. Make sure the reader can find these answers easily – don’t bury them in the detail.

One way to organise these main ideas is to do a mind map or brain storm with a colleague. After this session, aim to write the key points down on one A4 page.

You can also check the organisation or logical structure of your information by listing all the headings (or first sentences of each paragraph) on a new page. Do these headings (or sentences) make sense to a colleague?

If you do not have the information organised clearly – or what we say, a good macro-structure – then no matter how clear your sentences are, you may well lose your reader.

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