I had planned to mix things up a bit in this blog between three general topic areas: 1) things of interest to those who have a creative writing bent [which could be almost anything], 2) the areas I consider my “niche” writing interests, and when possible how they tie in either to business or writing concerns, and 3) useful tips for those who don’t care to write but sometimes must for business purposes.
So far, I have set a structure for this blog that follows that pattern.
However, given that today is technically the legal New Year holiday, and also prompted by the observations of one of my commenters, I thought I would do a kind of a New Year bonus and do two Tip style blog posts in succession.
So, although in a sense this post may be jumping ahead out of sequence on Tips, I thought I’d discuss an area that too many writers get hung up during their writing process. I even know professionals who get hung up in this way, if through lack of proper instruction they developed a less-than-ideal habit.
To review a bit, the Blog covered that the first step in a good document creation process involves an in-tandem assessment of who the reader . . . or audience . . . is for your document along with what that reader(s) needs are from the document.
Then, the next part of the process involves planning: as one of my commentors rightly observed, most without a good deal of specialized training will use a traditional outlining process to do that.
Assuming no research involved in the project, or that the research phase came in as a predecessor to the outlining/planning phase, this brings the author to the point where the composing, or writing, process phase of developing the document will actually begin.
Now, we’re going to reverse our perspective, here, from linear steps such as audience assessment to planning to writing.
What I’m going to discuss in this Tip post is: the portion of the document you should hold off on writing.
Over and over again, I see writers get hung up because they pick up their outline, see “Introduction” . . . and try to write it.
That’s both an unwieldy and an unproductive writing process.
You will immeasurably improve your writing process . . . and its outcome . . . if you divest yourself of this routine.
Indeed, when you follow your outline to compose, you should choose one of your content points. If you feel most comfortable in sequence, you can do that starting at the first content point. Or, you may wish to tackle the most difficult, least difficult, or one with the greatest data volume and put the rest together like a puzzle.
One way or another, though, you should in your actual writing process dive right into your content points.
In an effective writing process, the writer (usually) puts off writing the Introduction . . . either until the very last piece of the document or to the last piece excepting the Conclusion. Just skip right over that in your Outline, and come back to it later.
I was fortunate in my very first Technical Writing course, a pilot course and one of the first in the country, that the instructor of that course taught the class a rather logical concept: “how do you introduce something when you don’t what it is you are trying to introduce?” (For those who follow comments, this one was at Salem State College.)
Yet, I see even professionals trying to work sequentially starting with the Introduction. And nearly all non-professional writers make this . . . well, if not an error, it certainly adds several degrees of difficulty to the writing process.
So, when you start to write from your outline . . . skip over the Introduction heading entirely. [It bears purposeful redundancy on this point.]
Write your content, and come back to that later. [In some types of documents, the Introduction can become quite clear in the writer’s mind about 3/4s of the way through, and if you suddenly have the light bulb effect at such a time, of course, go for it at that juncture.]
Try this technique if you have gotten hung up starting out with an Introduction section.
I think you’ll find it astounding how much difference this one technique can make both in your productivity and if not enjoyment, at least reduction of aggravation in crafting your documents.
If you have to write something when you don’t prefer to write, or you would if there weren’t so many other duties pressing but there are other duties pressing, wouldn’t you prefer to reduce the stress and frustration of the process by applying this kind of logical technique to your process?
