The writing process Flashcards
What is planning?
The first step in effective business writing is understanding your purpose. Knowing what you want to communicate helps you choose the right format and style. Without a clear goal, your writing may be disorganized, repetitive, or confusing, leading to inefficiency and potential rewrites. For larger tasks like reports or presentations, planning is essential to manage information and maintain a clear structure.
Defining the objectives of your writing helps clarify its purpose and guide its format. It also allows you to tailor the content to your audience. For instance, a presentation for colleagues may use a different tone than one for senior management. To ensure your message is clear and effective, ask yourself these key questions:
What is my message?
How can I communicate it effectively (tone, format, or channel)?
Who is my audience?
What result do I want to achieve?
By answering these questions, you can create focused, purposeful, and audience-appropriate communication.
For large business writing tasks, like reports or articles, planning often includes gathering data or conducting research.
Understanding your purpose helps you choose the right format and channel. Simple messages, such as memos, can be sent via email, while formal reports may require detailed formatting and a printable document.
The richness of a channel refers to how much meaning it conveys. Face-to-face communication is rich because it includes tone, body language, and expressions. In contrast, email is less rich but can be ideal for sharing technical or detailed information where clarity is crucial.
Selecting the right channel depends on the complexity of your message and how it’s best communicated.
What is organising?
The next stage in the writing process is organising one’s ideas or structuring the information. There are several ways of doing this:
Pyramid structures (outlining)
The premise of pyramid structures is that any piece of writing is expansive, and its principle is that an idea at any level summarises all the ideas below it. Organising ideas into a pyramid structure encourages a logical order of ideas, as ideas that do not fit under a broader idea will quickly become apparent. Outlining can be done directly on a word processor using headings, subheadings, and bullet points. One limitation with pyramid structures is that not all pieces of writing might adhere to the expanding, branching, linear structure.
Spider diagrams and mind maps (clustering)
Where a pyramid structure usually begins with the central idea at the top, a spider diagram begins with the central idea in the middle and branches out, like a tree, as related ideas cluster together. This is a more fluid and exploratory way of organising ideas than a pyramid diagram and is perhaps better suited to projects where the aim is not yet clear. Mind maps or concept maps are essentially kinds of spider diagrams; as originally formulated, they tended to use visual devices, such as different colours and font sizes, to associate or emphasise connections.
What is drafting?
Logic and Coherence
With your planning done, you can begin drafting with a clear sense of direction. At this stage, the aim should be to generate a flowing, coherent piece of writing with a logical flow. Each paragraph or section should deal with a single idea or chunk of information, which it develops or presents in full, before flowing on to a related idea in the next paragraph. The succession of ideas should also develop the writing’s main point or message.
Audience/Recipient and Style
As you draft and as your writing takes shape, start to consider your recipient or anticipated audience: What is the writing meant to convey or how is it intended to affect them? What style would best suit the occasion and the objective? Common objectives in business are the imparting of information (a report on an assigned task, the latest financial results, a division’s performance) and initiation of some kind of action (a meeting, a new project, the opening of a new branch, and so on). If imparting information, the document must be well laid out, easy to read, and perhaps augmented with visual aids such as graphs. If encouraging or directing action, the style should be assertive or persuasive.
In both cases, the anticipated recipient or audience must be considered so that the language is effectual. The kind of persuasive language one might use when addressing a customer or a client - for example, in urging them to buy a certain product, which might be more colloquial and avoid overly technical terms - would be very different to the kind of language one might use in discussion with the designer of that product. Some questions to consider are:
What is the status (authority, seniority) of the person I am writing to?
Does the recipient have any existing background information on this matter?
Are there any cross-cultural factors that should be considered?
What does the recipient need to know in order to perform the required action?
What is revising?
In this phase of writing, you will engage mainly in proofreading for errors of grammar and spelling and in editing to ensure clarity, consistency, good structure, and good style. Revision might also entail rewriting or restructuring, as sometimes larger problems in a piece of writing become apparent only later. Revision also needn’t happen only after the whole piece has been drafted; revision of smaller parts can occur while the other parts are still being written. The process of writing is a recursive one, in which one continually circles back on previous work as one moves forward with new sections.
