Today I’m thinking about the act of organization in writing and how it can function like a recipe from designing through drafting and review/editing.

I have developed and advocate for a radically reader-focused approach to teaching workplace writing (what’s usually called Business/Technical/Professional Writing in colleges), an approach that focuses on very specific skills for

• generating useful information for a real reader who needs the information (not a teacher),

• organizing the information logically and usually “deductively”—main point first,

• using document design to make documents easy for readers to navigate, and

• crafting a clear, concise, plain English style through management of paragraphs, sentences, word choices, and mechanics.

I call this approach the HOCs and LOCs approach: HOCs=Higher Order Concerns (CONTENT, ORGANIZATION, DOCUMENT DESIGN); LOCs=Lower Order Concerns (Paragraphs, Sentences, Word Choices, Mechanics). I think of this as a systems approach to thinking about and teaching workplace writing.

The usefulness and readability of any document is generated through these 7 HOCs & LOCs.

In this post, I’m considering the “system” of ORGANIZATION: beyond mere genre requirements (letters, memos, proposals, etc.), what underlying organizational principles should students learn, organizational principles that would apply to any kind of workplace document?

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ZERO CONTENT should be the goal of all practical writing. 

That concept is most succinctly expressed in the following mathematical statement: zC = RQ - WA, where zC=ZERO CONTENT; RQ = Reader’s Questions; WA = Writer’s Answers.

If you teach (practical) writing at any level (in this swatch I include professional writing of any kind and college writing, as well as its antecedents from first grade onward), I think you should SPOTLIGHT (floodlight) the critically important writing skills for generating useful content for an interested reader. 

Useful content should always be the practical writer’s JOB #1. (Only if there’s useful content--for an interested reader--do all the “presentation” skills of writing make sense.)

Let me explain this essential equation for determining when a document has reached ZERO CONTENT….

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In order not to go crazy

teaching business/technical

writing for 35 years in college, you go out into the world

and work with real writers in the workplace who are writing

for real readers.

                                In the process you lose the theory

and the usual academic approach and discover the obvious

first principles of communicating useful information to people

who need it.

Then you write a textbook that focuses on these

fundamental concepts and techniques and you teach them

to students, whom you have in class for less than

40 hours, realizing how easy the principles are to learn

but how much practice it takes

before they become

second

nature.

Here’s that textbook, Mastering Workplace Writing (MWW).

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