The words that you choose to tell your story are important, but what about how you arrange them and, more generally, how you arrange your information? Effective writing depends not just on word choice but on how you put those words together.
Why We Need Structure
How you structure your writing can mean the difference between boring your reader or exciting them, between confusing them or enlightening them, or between losing them or winning them over and convincing them of the veracity of your arguments.
In the first drafts of our writing, we often perform a kind of data dump, putting everything we know about our topic onto paper or onto the screen, but it's not enough to just leave it as it is - our information also has to be carefully structured if it is to be understood and accepted by our future readers. We need to start thinking about how to arrange our information, what to leave in and out, and the best way to express ourselves.
Here are some structuring ideas to apply to your work today:
Tips To Create Great Structure
Decide on a method for sharing your information. Nearly all writing needs to be ordered in some way. You might like to roll out your information chronologically, geographically, by topic or theme, by argument, from most to least important, or from the broad to the specific, (and usually a combination of these), just for example. Just pick what ever seems most appropriate and do-able for your project.
Use topic sentences. The topic sentence tells the reader what is going to be discussed in that paragraph. If the reader dives into a paragraph knowing what's coming, they are more likely to follow the argument and remember it.
When your reader looks at the first sentence of each paragraph, they should find it easy to get a feel for your argument and the (usually many) points that you are making in your work. In other words, the topic sentence makes a great signpost for what's to come.
But the topic sentence is not just good for the reader, it's good for the writer too. By looking at your topic sentences you, as the writer, can easily see what topics you have covered so far and what you are missing; you can see if you have repeated yourself (and delete the repetition); you can easily work out if your paragraphs are in a logical order (and switch them around if you need to); and finally, you can use topic sentences to keep your paragraph on track - do this by checking that all the sentences in the paragraph relate to the topic sentence (and if they don't, you should delete them or move them to a more appropriate spot).
Consider using headings to help organise your work and guide your reader. Headings work like topic sentences and make it even easier for your reader to navigate your work and your ideas. But make sure your headings match their content - it's easy to revise your paragraphs and the points you are making but forget to change the headings to match.
Know what you want to say. You need to decide on an angle to take with your work and stick to it. Don't hedge your bets. So, once you have collected information and written down what you know, decide what you believe and what broad points (and specific points) you want to make. Use this to guide your writing and your structure.
Check for and add missing information. If you are making an argument or telling the reader what you believe, then you need to make sure that all your evidence is included and, importantly, that the premise for your argument is well thought out and clearly stated from the start. It's easy to lose a reader's trust if you make assertions without anything to back them up.
Delete irrelevant information. This is an important one. Most writers love their words and their carefully crafted sentences, which means it's very difficult to just get rid of them. But really, if your words don't support your argument they are just getting in the way and confusing your reader. Delete delete delete! (or just save them in another document, like I do, because you love them too much).
Add new information after established information. If you are dealing with a lot of information, it is easy to lose track of what you have already told or explained to your reader. So double check that your reader always has a thorough context for understanding any new information that you are introducing.
Use parallel structuring. Parallel structuring involves expressing similar ideas in a similar (and consistent) grammatical form, which improves the clarity, flow and rhythm of your writing. Typically, readers will use the structure and content of one sentence (or part of a sentence) to anticipate the structure and content of the next, so it is important that ideas are expressed in a similar and predictable grammatical structure. For example, the following sentence doesn't use a predictable grammatical structure: 'The dog liked to bark at the neighbours, chew up my furniture and digging in the backyard.' To have a similar grammatical structure it should read as 'The dog liked to bark at the neighbours, chew up my furniture and dig in the backyard.' (So, bark, chew and dig rather than bark, chew and digging).
Employ a qualified editor to do an amazing structural edit on your work. Because we love it and we are qualified and trained to do it really well.
Conclusion
Good structuring often takes a lot of work and calls for numerous read throughs and alterations to get just right. There can be a lot of zooming in and out to get a feel for how things are all sitting together but it is well worth the effort, and it can be fun - well, it is for me anyway.
Happy writing.
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