By Dana P Skopal, PhD

Writing is an essential communication tool in the workplace, but at times the final written version may not be properly understood by your reader / targeted audience. As a writer, you need to ask: can your message  be clearly understood by the targeted audience?

It is rare to produce a clear convincing argument without researching the facts and planning your document structure (or logically linking points). Yet the two common errors that we see in our writing workshops are firstly, giving too much background information that detracts from the main message, and secondly, an illogical information structure.

So let’s go to the basics of writing, but beyond grammar – good sentence structure is assumed. You need to know your subject matter before you can write. Read relevant material and make notes on the evidence or data that you can use to support your argument. If you are uncertain about which way to argue, then make a list of the positives and negatives. If your mind is muddled, then your writing will not make sense.

Next, planning needs to be a part of the writing process. You can start to plan once you know your main information or possible arguments. Do you plan with dot points or notes, even a mind-map? Or do you just sit and write as you work through the material that you want to tell your reader?  Both are planning steps, but you then need to logically order the information for your reader. This means focusing on your overall structure and wording of your main headings, which needs to be done before any editing.

When you have your final draft, check the logical order of your content before any final edit. One method is to take your headings and first sentence of each paragraph and check that they make sense to an independent reader (without the remaining paragraph content).

Know your information, plan, draft and check your structure – before you send out your final version.

Copyright © Opal Affinity Pty Ltd 2017