OPERATIVITZACIÓ DE LES CREENCES-TIPUS. POTÈNCIA D'UNA CREENÇA

• Who is going to read this? - imagine an 'archetype'

• Have I got credibility with this person? • What is their level of technical knowledge? • What do they need to know?

- or, away from work, what would they like to know? • How much time do they have to attend to me?

• Keep the reader in mind throughout the writing process.

Planning

Start with the basics. What is your piece about? What's its key message? Most short pieces by professional journalists make one point. Taking a (business) magazine at random from the shelves above my desk, I find pieces with the following messages:

• There are too many people telling business owners what they 'should' do.

• High-end retail businesses are similar to 'business-to-business' ones.

• It's harder to get stuff done than many people think. • Do big-business bosses secretly despise their customers?

GETTING IT DONE – AUDIENCE, PLANNING AND STRUCTURE

None of the pieces is earth-shattering, but they all make a point, elaborate on it a bit, then either restate it or revisit it in some new way in the light of the elaborations. The pieces work nicely because they are planned and focused.

Even large works can often be boiled down to simple, basic themes – it's the depth, breadth, integrity, thoroughness and origin- ality of the themes' exploration that makes a great long piece of work. (One can, of course, take boiling-down too far. I like Woody Allen's joke: 'I've just speed-read War and Peace. It's about Russians.')

So, what is your piece about? In a couple of sentences, please. Once you have established what you are writing about, the next question is, What are you going to say about it? Make a list of points you want to make.

What happens for me is that this list grows once I start answer- ing another question – How am I going to say it? – and start doing some proper planning. Which leads nicely on to the topic of structure.

Structure

There are two basic structures – narrative and aspect-by-aspect. Simple narrative is the best way of ensuring a piece flows. I believe we are born with an instinct for narrative — 'Tell me a story,' our children ask from a very early age. This happened; then that happened; then that happened. Beginning, middle and end.

If you are describing long, complex processes, think of how you can break these down into phases or stages – groups of naturally related actions that occur reasonably closely together in time. These will be the sections of the piece.

For example, the process of doing a commercial deal could be broken down into:

GETTING IT DONE – AUDIENCE, PLANNING AND STRUCTURE

• Initial contact

• Testing how serious both sides are • Producing an outline agreement • Building trust

• Negotiating detail • Last-minute problems • Signing.

Clearly some sections may overlap in time – 'building trust', for example, is pretty much a continuous process – while others fit clearly into time-slots. Point this out to the reader. But you can still order them sequentially if you:

• Order them by starting time • Explain where they overlap

• If the overlaps are complex, use a bar diagram to illustrate them. The other basic structure for looking at a topic is aspect-by-aspect. A book on literary criticism could take a historical (narrative) view, or it could arrange its material this way: drama, poetry, novels, short stories, non-fiction (or any other way of subdividing the subject).

When planning to present material aspect-by-aspect, a 'mind- map' is hugely useful. Put the subject at the centre of the page, then imagine various aspects radiating out from it like spokes from a hub. For example, a piece for a local paper on a proposed bypass might look at the consequences for various groups of town resi- dents: motorists, farmers, traders, shoppers, children getting to school etc. Each one of these would have a 'spoke' coming off the

GETTING IT DONE – AUDIENCE, PLANNING AND STRUCTURE

hub. The analogy between the mind-map and a bicycle wheel breaks down, of course, when spokes of the mind-map fork or multi-divide: 'The new bypass will have four main consequences for town traders . ..'

If you're stuck for spokes, remember Kipling's Elephant's Child, who said:

I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

If asked to write a piece on 'Thanksgiving Day', the Elephant's Child would produce a piece that told readers what it is, what the meaning of it is, on what day it's celebrated, what actually happens, where it's celebrated, and the sort of people who celebrate it.

When you come to turn the mind-map into a plan for a piece of writing, put the aspects in an order that readers will find useful. Unless otherwise instructed, they will assume that the first point you make is the most important one. Use this, or tell the reader that you are going to list the aspects in some other order, such as cost.

Don't waste the opportunity to pass information to the reader by just placing things in random order.

A useful tool is the 'dialectic'. This isn't anything to do with Dalek-speak, fortunately, but a way of presenting arguments. It's been compared to tennis.

• Here's the standard view on the subject (the 'thesis').

• Now, here is the opposite argument (the 'antithesis') – or, more often and more interesting, here are some other opposing views. • And my view (the 'synthesis') is . . .

GETTING IT DONE – AUDIENCE, PLANNING AND STRUCTURE

Actually, most 'theses' have several antitheses, which is not what the founders of the dialectic believed. Work through them sequentially: • Thesis • Antithesis A • Comments on Antithesis A • Antithesis B • Comments on Antithesis B • Antithesis C • Comments on Antithesis C • (and so on . . .) • My view.

Academic essays work well following this model, especially if the last section agrees with what the person marking the paper thinks.

Of course, you can embed one of the basic structures in the other. So the literary criticism book that divided topics into drama, poetry, novels, short stories and non-fiction could then deal with each of these historically (narrative embedded in aspect-by- aspect). Or the aspect-by-aspect treatment of specific issues can be embedded in a narrative: in the piece on the bypass, you could begin with some history (traffic growth since 1970, early protest groups etc.) up to the current moment. Then the middle section could deal aspect-by-aspect with the various issues shown in the mind-map, and finally a section could talk about the future.

A business report might follow the model below, which has a 'narrative' feel to it but is not just a simple story:

GETTING IT DONE – AUDIENCE, PLANNING AND STRUCTURE

• Current problem

• Initial attempts at solving it, and why they failed • Proposed new solution

• Implications of new solution for various parts of the business/other relevant parties

• Any objections, and how they will be met

• Specific actions required of individual people/departments • Paint a picture of what things will be like when the new solution

is put into practice successfully.

Once you have thought through your overall plan, you really are ready to get writing!