Organize Your E-mail Before You Write

Natalie Canavor and Claire Meirowitz

In school, your teachers probably made you create a careful outline of your essays and papers before writing. Here’s the problem: If you haven’t thought through your content and made the decisions suggested in the previous chapters, you’ll find it horrendously hard to organize the material.

But once you’ve thought about goal, audience, and mapping your content, organizing your piece logically becomes a snap.

Suppose you’re writing a memo to introduce your staff to a new system for reporting their work hours.

• Goal—To minimize grumbling and objections to a new system and have staff accept the new way of doing things with reasonable cheerfulness, as well as understand the basics of what they’ll have to do.

• Audience—One you know well (your staff), and their responses probably run the gamut from those comfortable with change to active resistors.

• Tone—“Friendly formal” seems best.

• Content mapping—What do you need to say to this audience to get what you want?

1. Explain the need for a new system briefly.

2. Announce the start date.

3. Show how it works in practical terms.

4. Mention any advantages the new system might hold for the staff.

5. Make sure they understand that they have no choice.

6. Offer a way for them to get answers to any questions they may have.

7. Mention any negative results if they don’t follow the new system.

You know what needs to be communicated. So all you have to do is organize it—or maybe just check to see whether you’re satisfied with the organization that’s fallen into place.

You can make choices about what order to put things in, but it wouldn’t be logical to start with #3—which such memos often do—because readers won’t know why they should care about a new system if they don’t know that they must use it.

What’s your best opening? A clear statement announcing the new system and starting date. What’s a good ending? The offer to entertain questions lets you end on a positive note. The middle offers some choice—#3 and #4 could be interchanged. You can move #5, #6, and #7 around, but introducing a threat earlier may get some readers’ backs up.

Try your hand at writing the memo before looking at our version.

Dear Staff Members:

As of September 1, we’ll all be using a new system for reporting our time. Here’s how it works.

At the beginning of each week, you’ll get an e-mailed form (etc., as clearly and briefly as possible).

The new system will give you your paychecks and expense reimbursements two or three days faster because Payroll can process records more quickly when the information is clear.

We’ll meet briefly to go over the process on Monday at 10 a.m. in the conference room. Ask any questions about it then, and follow up with me personally if necessary. It’s important to get this right because your check won’t be issued if you don’t follow through properly.

Thanks for handling this change efficiently.—Jim

Note that we added a few things to the plan when we came to the actual writing: announcing the meeting, and the “thanks” at the end. Why? Because neither idea had occurred to us before. As we wrote the simple memo, the meeting seemed like a good way to go in the circumstances outlined, and the closing carries both conviction that the new rules will be followed and a touch of appreciation for accepting procedural change (which, face it, nobody likes).

When the “technical” part of an e-mail needs to be long or complicated, it might better be delivered as an attachment; or you can make it the final section of the e-mail and head it clearly (How to Use the System). Otherwise, readers may get lost in the details and miss important parts of your message.

Writing Helps You Think

Here’s something else that is important about writing effectively when you give it a chance: What you write reveals the quality of your thinking. When you really understand what you’re writing about, you can describe it clearly. If Jim describes the new system but is hazy about how it works, that will show up in his memo.

To reverse the idea, consider that the reason so much bad writing exists is probably because there’s so much bad thinking.

This is all too true in today’s business world. Fuzzy, confused writing results from fuzzy, confused thinking. Overinflated claims for a person, product, or organization backed by little or no evidence—what we call “empty rhetoric”—lack substance and fool no one.

In fact, if you want to be sure you understand a new product, service, or technical procedure, try writing about it (or teaching it to someone else). When you hit gaps in your knowledge or thinking, take the time to remedy them. You can do research, ask a colleague, think some more, review your notes: whatever it takes. Most writers we know have one eye on their writing, the other on a search engine as they work so that they can look up terms and references they don’t understand.

You can’t fake good writing because it’s built on good thinking. But take the trouble to try to write well, and the process will lead you back to your thinking. Improve your thinking, and you’ll write better—a win-win situation.

Many professionals—from scientists to artists to business leaders—use writing as a way of crystallizing their thinking. Attempting to articulate ideas helps you figure out what you know and what you don’t know, and points up what you need to find out.

With relatively short documents, you can choose to just write it all down organically and see what you’ve got. If you followed the first four steps of our strategy, your material will probably be reasonably organized. Then you can take a closer look and start shifting around sentences, paragraphs, and sections to improve the logical flow of your ideas, facts, and argument.

Mapping Your Content

While mapping the content leads you to a natural organization for relatively short and simple kinds of writing—memos, letters, and such—longer and more complicated materials make organizing more of a challenge.

Here are some approaches professional writers use to organize their work when it’s complex. These approaches can be adapted for proposals, reports, articles, and other writing projects where you have a substantial amount of information to pull into shape. Some approaches give you ways to build in the organization early on, saving you lots of time later:

1. Divide and conquer—List your major project components that are likely to make up sections in the final document, and give each a separate piece of “paper” (a file) on your computer. For example, if you’re assigned to assemble a company history, you might have sections such as Founding and Early History, Important People, Product Development, Current Financial Picture, and so on. Then, as you’re assembling information, add the relevant information to the appropriate page or file. Thanks to the computer, you can shuffle the pieces around after collecting them, too. People used to do this on index cards—and some still do—so try that if you’re a tactile learner.

2. Create a master list—Skim your pile of raw notes and make a list of the most important ideas or elements. Review the list and see what order seems most logical and rearrange as necessary. Then for each idea or element, find the backup information in your material and add it in directly under the right heading.

3. Color code—Print out your mass of material and go through it with colored markers, matching up the color with a section—green for financial information, for example. You can also mark a piece for great quotes, possible leads, endings, and more so that they’re easy to find later. You can color code on your computer screen, too, but because it’s hard to do a lot of reading on screen, many people prefer to work with printouts.

4. Bubble it—Some of us learned this method in school. It works best with pen and paper. Put each major idea on paper with a circle around it, leaving plenty of room among the circles. Then draw lines between the circles of those ideas that connect, or logically follow, the other. This gets messy, but you can see the whole complicated picture on one sheet. If you’re a visual thinker, it might be the technique for you. The Visual Thesaurus (www.visualthesaurus.com) is an example of this technique. Thinkmap (www.thinkmap.com) describes it as creating “word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words.”

5. Don’t look now—Without referring to your massive pile of notes, and preferably after you haven’t looked through it for a day or so, think about what comes to your mind as important (or interesting) about the information you’ve collected. Many of us find our subconscious has been hard at work figuring this out while we weren’t actively focused on the project. Write down the points that occur to you, and then review your material for backup in each category.

6. Tell somebody—Suppose you’re reporting on a research project. Ask yourself, what would I say if X (my boss, girlfriend, cube-mate, whoever) asked me why I did this, why does it matter, what did I find? Your answer gives you the kernel of the report and a structure that works.

7. Let your computer do more of the work—There is a lot of project management software available, ranging from open source desktop and Web-based programs to proprietary programs for desktops and the Web. They vary in difficulty and in the learning curve required to use them. Many are collaborative, which means you can work with others who are not sitting next to you but are continents away.

Try some of these systems out and see if they help. If not, don’t use them—they are not ends in themselves. Everyone works differently, and there’s never only one way to get where you want. Thanks to modern technology, the tools for organizing, reorganizing, shifting material, and making big changes are easy to use.

We won’t talk in detail about editing yet, because we have to get the words down first. But here’s a liberating thought: You’re never—well, hardly ever—stuck with your initial version. In fact, writers label that version “the first draft,” then review it to see what’s not working, and fix it.

That means you can experiment with your first draft and not get hung up on details and missing pieces. Will you have to schedule time for editing a major writing project? Yes, but ultimately, you can get the work done with surprising efficiency.