The Structured Writing Method
At the heart of everything we do is a writing method which works for every business document and student essay.
The Structured Writing Method is a linear process that encourages you to spend most of your time thinking, planning and collaborating before writing begins. This structured approach ensures that you not only produce documents that are clear and engaging and structurally fit for purpose, but that you do so faster. The method provides a logical, linear process that everyone can follow.
Stage 1: Objective Setting
What do you want to achieve? This is a critical consideration because all documents should be created for a known purpose. That’s why the Structured Writing Method starts with Objective Setting, as this can profoundly affect everything else that happens subsequently – from structure, to message, to tone of voice. It is also the logical place to start when starting most business activities (not just writing) as it forces you to identify where the value in a particular task lies.
Stage 2: Messaging
Having worked out what you want to achieve the next logical question to ask is: what do you want to say? Every business document exists to communicate a certain message. The Structured Writing Method provides clear guidance on how to make such messages as clear, concise, compelling and, if appropriate, competitive as possible. (There is a special version of our course aimed at bid writers which includes focused guidance on messaging for executive summaries and bid questions.)
Stage 3: Structuring
Architects often talk about ‘form following function’ and the same is true of documents. The next stage of the method, therefore, concentrates on how to create the right structure to appropriately deliver your message to achieve your objective(s). The courses we teach use Microsoft Word’s Outline View to help writers rapidly, and more effectively, structure their writing. If you use AI writing tools, this is more important than ever. Our bid writing course includes lessons about the particular challenges of structuring executive summaries and complex bid questions. It also shows how to create storyboards to revolutionise the quality and efficiency of the bid process.
Stage 4: Crafting
A key principle of the Structured Writing Method is that writing is the very last thing you do. After you’ve worked out your initial objectives, fine-tuned your messages and created the right structure for your documents, you will become a much more confident writer – and the documents you produce will automatically become clearer and more focused. But it is clearly still important to learn how to improve the craft of writing itself. In this last section, the Structured Writing Method looks at matters of style such as how to write for skim-readers, how to engage a reader, how to write with clarity and how to write with authority. It also clarifies key areas of grammar and punctuation, and teaches techniques for proofreading.