Once upon a time, you had to write an intro.

Maybe it was for a business letter (probably a query letter, if you’re one of my Creative Writing readers). Maybe it was for a memo you had to write at work. More likely it was for an English class, or the essay portion of an exam. You had the whole body of your document ready, carefully crafted, ready to spill upon the page, but you found yourself hesitating at the first line. You had no idea how to start.

That’s a normal problem. Actually, no, it’s a whole handful of normal problems. Sometimes you have no idea what to say in the introduction. Sometimes you know exactly what you want to say, but you have no idea how to get started. Sometimes you know exactly what you want to say, but what you want to say is the body of your document so there’s no point to an introduction. Sometimes you know exactly what you want to say, but it’s way, way too complicated to sum up, and you don’t even know where to start.

And, of course, sometimes you have no idea what to say at all. You don’t have the body of your document ready, but you need to get started somewhere. All of these problems come crashing together at the bottleneck that is the intro. The first paragraph. The first word. Once upon a time, you had to write an intro, and chances are pretty good you hated it.

The Other Problem

In all that list of problems you might have encountered, there was a big one missing: the reader’s.

I hinted at this issue back in my introduction to the series, but it’s critical to understanding the problem of introductions, and it’s the key to taking the stress out of writing your own. The problem is the gap between what you know (as the writer) and what your reader knows (as the reader). See, there’s something else that happened once upon a time. Once upon a time, you picked up a business letter, or a memo, or an essay someone else had written, and you found yourself two or three paragraphs in, wondering what it was you were reading.

Good readers are able to figure out what a document is about, and what they can get out of it. Good writers don’t make them.

The purpose of an introduction is to bring the reader up to speed. A friend of mine called it a roadmap. It’s an overview of what this document is, and where it’s going. A good introduction completely brings the reader into the conversation, and then the body of the document carries on the discussion.

An Introduction to Metadata

Another way of saying that, without all the metaphors, is that an introduction establishes the document’s context. That’s complicated a little bit by the fact that every document has another element that also works to establish context, and it’s likely one you’ve never thought much about — the document type itself.

I often refer to this as the document’s metadata, the information conveyed by the document, but not conveyed within the introduction, body, or conclusion. In a business letter, this includes the letterhead, the date, and the addressee. In a memo, it’s the subject line. In a paperback novel, it’s the cover art and the glowing recommendation by Stephen King. Every part of the document, every element of the template and format conveys information to the reader, and all of this information establishes an expectation before the reader ever gets to the first word of the actual message.

I may talk about document metadata at more length in the final post in this series, but it’s important to introduce it now, because it impacts your introduction. Your introduction needs to establish the context of your document, and then get out of the way. If your document’s metadata includes your name, you probably don’t need to include your name in the introduction. If your document’s metadata includes a detailed subject line, you probably don’t need to include that subject verbatim in the introduction. Your introduction is an opportunity to present all of the contextual information a reader would need to get into the body of your document, that isn’t already present in the document’s metadata.

Of course, sometimes your metadata betrays you. Sometimes you need to use your introduction to correct a reader’s wrong assumptions. Maybe you’re writing a friendly, creative message in a formal, professional business letter format. Use your introduction as an opportunity to change the reader’s expectations by establishing a different voice. Maybe you’re releasing a serious, time-sensitive policy memo as a company-wide email. Use your introduction to clarify the special circumstances and make sure your readers know what is expected of them.

Writing a Good Introduction

When I started my first day teaching Technical Writing last fall, I got up in front of the class…and froze. My heart raced, and my words failed me. I looked out at all those eyes, all those students waiting to hear my words of wisdom, and all I could think about was my paralyzing panic.

My dad is (among many other things) a Speech professor, and when I told him about that experience, he had some simple advice for me. “Think about the students.” He said that any public speaker, no matter how practiced, how polished, how perfect, would lock up just like I did if they let themselves get caught in a cycle of self-evaluation while presenting to a crowd. It’s human nature. He said the key was to turn my attention outward, to think about what it was the students needed to know, and focus on answering that need, and then the words would come easily.

He was right. I probably wouldn’t have survived the semester without that one bit of advice, but it was spot on. And, when it comes right down to it, that’s also the key to writing great introductions. Don’t think about your paper. Don’t think about your document’s body, or your list of points, or how smooth or silly your opening line is. Think about your reader. Think about the person or people who will be reading this document (now, and in the future), and tell them what they need to know.

I’ve given you some samples of things they might be looking for in the discussion of metadata, but that’s only a portion of it. You’ll need to establish your general topic. Maybe you need to clarify whether this document is informative or persuasive. Maybe you need to clarify whether this document is entertaining or technical. Maybe you need to provide an executive summary — a quick overview of the document’s contents — and maybe you don’t.

If that’s aggravatingly vague, it’s because every document is different. There are some standard elements from document type to document type, and I’ll try to hit on those in more detail when I discuss the document types directly, but for the document you’re working on right now, it’s enough to know that the purpose of the introduction is to bring the reader up to speed. When you launch into that opening sentence, you’re not discussing your topic yet. You’re not perfecting presentation, or conveying information. Right now, you’re not even communicating.

Instead, focus on that disconnect and do what’s necessary to fix it. Figure out where your reader is, and where your document takes place, and say the words that need to be said to create a link between the two. That’s what I mean when I talk about negotiating a connection. That’s a good introduction.

Photo credit aussiegall.

My two-year-old daughter got a set of building blocks for Christmas, and that got me thinking about how to make you a better writer. No, really.

One of her favorite games for a long time now has been “stack and smash.” She started doing it with empty thread spools, putting two or three together in a tower, then knocking it over. She’d laugh and laugh. We watched her motor skills improve as she got better and better at stacking the blocks, sometimes making a broad base with two or three spools so the tower could climb higher.

She didn’t do any of that to improve hand-eye coordination or to master planning and structural design. Her only goal was to get a bigger smash. As she’s grown, we’ve bought her more and bigger and varied building blocks sets to get those side benefits — to get her thinking ahead, and planning, and recognizing the cause-effect of a poorly constructed tower toppling before she got to smash it — but her focus has only ever been on the payoff, and so this new set of blocks rather befuddled her.

It’s got arches and round pillars. It’s got smooth edges instead of interlocking bits. It’s designed to make beautiful buildings, not just a tall tower to be pushed over. She looked at the picture on the box, and she looked at me, and she asked, “How do I do that?”

Creating Deliberate Structure

Chances are good that’s where you are, with your writing. I’m not suggesting you’re producing two-year-old quality literature, but I suspect you’ve gone just far enough in your development as a writer to achieve what you had to everyday — whether that’s a shaky tower ten blocks high that’ll still make a satisfying crash, or a bare-bones email to your coworker that conveys the critical information “without any of that flowery stuff.” You’re getting by, but when you see a beautifully crafted document you just shake your head and wonder how you could possibly do something like that. In all likelihood, you wonder why you would even bother.

I’ve given some answers in earlier posts, and I’ll give more as we go along, but ultimately I assume if you’re reading this blog you’re at least interested in trying. And the first step in answering how you could do something like that is the same for your documents as it is for my daughter’s towers — creating deliberate structure.

Your building blocks aren’t red arches and blue columns and yellow cubes. Yours are words and sentences, facts and ideas, but if you just throw them together, pile them on top of each other in whatever order you happen to grasp at them, you’re going to end up with just as shoddy of a structure. I said before that writing is a mental game, and here’s another example. Before you start on any document, you should take a moment to consider the structure.

• What’s your foundation?
• What’s your purpose (the ultimate shape of your document)?
• What are the main points or themes you’re going to use to convey that idea (your building blocks)?
• Which of those points are most important?
• Which of those points are most complicated or unclear?
• How are you going to organize your points?
• Which bits involve informing, and which bits involve persuading?
• How can you arrange those bits to get the best effect?

Does that sound a little overwhelming? I understand if it does. That sort of deliberate planning is exactly what so befuddled my daughter. She’s an adventurer, though, and she’s competitive enough that when I built a little clocktower out of two rectangles, an arch, a pillar, and a triangle, she wanted to show me that she could do the same. You’ve got to have a little bit of that drive, to just get started, and then from there it’s just practice.

Following Good Blueprints

Of course, it helps to have some patterns to follow. I’ll get into that. This post is just the first in a three- or four-part series on the structure of your documents. To get you started, though, I wanted to briefly introduce the major elements of document structure, and some of the standard ways of resolving the issues I brought up earlier.

Every document should start with a strong introduction. This is the foundation of your structure, and if it’s weak or shaky or just thrown-together, your whole document will inherit that instability. If you skip it altogether, the first paragraphs of your body become the foundation, and that means they’re serving dual purpose and probably not doing very well at either of them. I know introductions can be daunting, and I hope to address that in my next post in this series, Negotiating a Connection. The most important thing to know, though, is that your reader starts into your document with little idea what to expect, whereas you start it off knowing exactly what information it will contain. That disconnect is what creates the need for an introduction, and that’s exactly what you’re trying to address. Focus on building introductions that will give your reader a basic understanding of the overall document — its purpose and its structure — and then smoothly transition into the actual body of your document.

The body of your document, of course, is the message itself. It’s the information you’re trying to convey. Here’s where most of your planning comes in, structurally, because the introduction and the conclusion are already pretty set in stone. When you get to the body, though, you have to decide how to organize this big pile of ideas and words that you’re trying to convert into information. The best method of organization varies from document to document, but here are some of the most common ones:

• Chronological (or Reverse Chronological)
• Thematic
• Parallel
• Least to Greatest (or Greatest to Least)
• General to Specific (or Specific to General)

The second post in this series will focus on all of these organizational methods in more detail, with some discussion of when each one might be appropriate, and some of the pitfalls each one brings with it. In all likelihood you’re already using some combination of these methods without thinking about it, but taking a moment to understand what’s going on behind the scenes (and approaching the structure of your document with deliberate intent) will help you to make a clearer, stronger document out of the techniques you’re already using.

And last comes your conclusion, another troubling element that you know you need to have, but don’t really know how to build. How are you supposed to restate the point of your document without just repeating yourself? If you could sum up the document in one paragraph, why did you need to write the whole document in the first place? The answer to that, again, is in deliberate structure. When you know your document structure, when you understand the real purpose of the body element and of the conclusion, it becomes a lot easier to put the right words in the right places. I’ll devote a whole blog post to helping you out with that.

For now, think about the documents you’ve written before, whether they were essays for college classes, or an email you sent your boss yesterday. Think about what you’ve done right, without even thinking about it, and about what you’ve done wrong, leaving your words shaky and ready to fall. If you know what you need help with — any particular problems you keep running into — let me know in the comments. I’ll be glad to address them as soon as I get the chance.

Photo credit zscheyge.

I’ve been writing for a week now, and I haven’t given you one word of practical advice, have I? Oh, sure, there’s promises aplenty, and I do need to spend some time negotiating a connection before I can start transferring knowledge, but when it comes right down to it, you’re here to learn how to write better. And what have I taught you?

In three posts, I’ve told you to expect simplicity, to stop believing in the blank page, and to think like a writer so you’ll be better at thinking like a human being. That’s more than just promising future advice, and it’s more than just groundwork. That is real, practical, makes-you-a-better-writer education right there. I’ve seen it time and time again, and I can tell you from experience: the first thing most people need, to improve their writing, is an attitude adjustment.

Changing Your Mind

I know you see the words “attitude adjustment” and you think of the strict old lady English teacher you had in Middle School, telling you to get up to the chalk board and diagram this sentence or you’re gonna get a smack from the hard-edged ruler. That’s not what I’m getting at. In fact, that’s the problem. That’s the stress that keeps you from writing, that’s the bad attitude that makes writing such a pain. Writing doesn’t need to be like that, but the only way to make it any better is to get over that experience, to put that mindset behind you.

That’s what I’ve been trying to accomplish. So, yeah, I promise big. I tell you that you can write better, with less effort, because until you believe that, you’re going to approach writing with fear and aggravation, and that’s going to get you nowhere. I tell you that idly scribbling down stories when you’re bored is going to make you a better person, and that writing a business letter to cancel your magazine subscription is heroic because, if you’re not already a writer, it’s so easy to respond to that long-ago frustration by compartmentalizing and pushing away. It’s so easy to convince yourself that trying to write well is a huge waste of time.

I know. I’ve always been a writer, but I spent a long time going through that process with math, because I was lousy at math in high school. There’s nothing to fear in math — it’s just numbers and rules — but I had a lot of math teachers who managed to create genuine anxiety in their quest to make math matter to me. That didn’t help. That drove me away. How many of you have gone through that same process with writing? It was challenging, it wasn’t particularly entertaining, and the people who could have made things clearer to you instead took it way, way too seriously….

I hang out with those kinds of people. Those kinds of people are my friends. So I definitely know they’re out there, and I know how much harder they’re making writing for all of you. The thing is…it doesn’t need to be. Writing is a mental game, and just like any game it’s got its rules. It’s got professional contenders who none of us would want to go up against in a casual match (those are the scary English professors), but most of us just want (or need) to put in a half hour, here and there, maybe three days a week. We want to be good enough not to embarrass ourselves, maybe even hope to impress the girl from the next cubicle over who stepped outside to watch us play, but nothing serious.

Writing can be like that, but you have to get there mentally before you can start practicing. That’s because, as I said, it’s a mental game. Good writing happens in your head. Prewriting, templates, structure and grammar and layout and design all develop in your head before you put a single word down on paper. As long as you’re fighting against your training, as long as you’re afraid of writing or nervous about it, you’re not bringing your A game.

Playing the Game

Still too vague? Let me get specific. Let’s consider “who” versus “whom.” The grammar rule goes that “who” acts as a subject and “whom” acts as an object, and for some of you that’s already enough language to bring back the menacing specter of the Middle School English teacher. That’s diagramming sentences.

I never learned how to diagram sentences. When I’m dropping “who” or “whom” into a sentence, I don’t think in terms of subjects and objects. I use the same trick you’d find in any “grammar for dummies” book: try out the sentence substituting in “he” or “him” for “who” or “whom.” If you don’t already know that trick (and it sounds useful to you), it’s explained briefly but clearly here.

It’s a simple rule, though, and it makes it easy to get “who” versus “whom” right nearly every single time. The problem is, the only people who care to get “who” versus “whom” right are people who are already writers. There’s another trick I use, to keep “effect” (usually a noun) and “affect” (usually a verb) straight. For example, “Your vote could affect our children’s lives! Just imagine the effect it will have.” Too close in pronunciation and meaning to easily keep separate, these words require a much more nuanced rule to keep them straight. Right?

It can be. Dictionary.com will give you two pages of information and link to more. But I solve the problem with a two-word phrase. The most common usages involve “effect” as a noun and “affect” as a verb. If you can grasp that, all you need is some handy way of remembering which is which. “Cause and effect” is a pretty easy one (two nouns). If you can just set in your head that it’s “cause and effect” and not “cause and affect,” then you know the “e” one is the noun. For me, I find the phrase “special effects” an easier one to keep straight — I’ve seen it in writing often enough that I know the proper spelling, and the pluralization marks it pretty clearly as a noun phrase.

Really, though, the problem isn’t coming up with a reliable trick or perfectly memorizing a grammar rule. The problem is caring enough to get it right in the first place. If you wrote an email to your boss saying, “How are we going to deal with the affects of this decision?” chances are good you’d get away with it. Chances are good, for most of us, that close enough is close enough. We’d rather settle for comprehensible writing than strive for good writing, because good writing is so hard!

It’s not. It’s really not. Once you have a handful of tips and tricks under your belt, writing well is mostly just a matter of trying to write well. As soon as you decide to try to keep “affect” and “effect” straight, you’ll be able to do it. That’s all there is to it.

It’s a mental game. I’m not asking you to become an Olympic-level contender, but I would really like to see you play. Come back Friday for our first scrimmage.

Between my About page, my introductory article, and just the name of the website, I’ve already made a lot of big promises. Turning Technical Writing into a simple, stress-free task is no small feat, but we’re going to get started right now.

While reading that introductory material, you may have noticed that I referred to Technical Writing more than once as “filling in the blanks.” When you know what you’re doing, that’s all it needs to be. I’ve heard students and engineers and writers alike complain about how intimidating the blank page is. I’ve been there, too. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that there are no blank pages. Not in Technical Writing, and not in Creative Writing, either. Maybe there’s a blank line, maybe there’s a blank box that needs a few paragraphs of text, but by the time you start working on a project, there’s no blank page.

Creative Writers handle this with prewriting (a topic I’ll discuss at length in other articles). If you wanted to write a short story or a novel, but found yourself overwhelmed by the blank page, you could address that stress by creating a mock Table of Contents, figuring out a detailed character list, maybe even developing a full plot synopsis. Once you’ve got several of those together, you don’t have a blank page anymore. You have a title and a chapter number and a character name, and you know where you’re starting from, where you’re headed, and all you have to do is write down what happens along the way.

That’s still a lot of work, and I’ve never promised anywhere “Effortless Syllables.” In Tech Writing, too, you’ll have to work hard on researching technical details, expressing yourself clearly, and fixing any errors along the way. What I have promised (and will again), is that the process of expressing yourself clearly and fixing errors can become accessible and even natural to you. There aren’t any mysteries to it.

Business Letter Blank Page

Back to our blank page, though. I briefly outlined above how a Creative Writer solves the problem of a starting point, but for Technical Writers it’s even easier. Let’s say, as an example, that I find myself in a situation where I have to write a business letter. I open Microsoft Office (or OpenOffice.Org Writer, or even Google Docs), and what does that software throw at me? A blank page. Terrifying, right?

It doesn’t have to be. Not to a Technical Writer. Not to anyone with much experience writing business letters. I know from long experience that a business letter starts with a letterhead containing author-identifying information (most often a return address), then comes the date, then the inside address, and the body of the letter, and so on. I know the structure of a standard business letter, and once you know that, the blank page could just as easily be a form full of blanks.

I always fill in the easy stuff first. I’d start off with my letterhead and the date, then fake in as much as I know of the internal address, then add a salutation and skip down to the bottom to add my signature block. Hah! I’m 90% finished writing my business letter! I’ve filled in fifteen out of sixteen boxes, until the only one left is the one in the middle labeled “body” or “message.”

Standard Business Letter as a Form

And I can already hear you objecting that that’s the hard part! You’re right. It doesn’t need to be stressful or challenging or mysterious, but the message is the hard part of writing a business letter. It should be! The message is the unique information, and the process of organizing and communicating information is one of the noblest, most amazing things people do. Filling out that final box is, in a way, heroic.

The point of this article, though, is that you shouldn’t have to guess where to start. You shouldn’t have to fumble around with formatting and layout. Your sole focus should be on communication, on getting to your message and figuring out how to say it. Surprisingly enough, getting straight to the hard part actually makes your job easier.

It’s pretty simple to see how that works with business letters, because we’ve all read plenty of business letters in our lives. Most of us have even written a few. That same process that I went through applies to nearly all technical documents, though. We have certain familiar document types, certain repeated templates, that have become standard formats, and once you learn how a particular document type works you can open up a blank page and just dive right in. Once you learn the shape of a document, you can tell at a glance exactly what information goes where. Not only that, you can fill in the easy stuff right away, and know what’s missing.

That’s what’s so daunting about the blank page. It gives you no feedback. It gives you no reference. There’s no sense of where to start, or how much to say, or when to say it. A standard document template strips away all that guesswork, and leaves just one or two empty boxes where you have to write down what it is you know, that someone else needs to know. That last step is one I can never do for you.

The document types, though? Those are my specialty. I can teach you how to write a business letter in your sleep. I can teach you how to write a memo, how to make a new document type from scratch, and force it into the shape you need. I can teach you shortcuts, handy tips, and critical rules. I can even teach you the difference between “who” and “whom,” and how to keep “effect” and “affect” straight. All of that information is available, but before it does you any good, you have to find the courage to get started.

That’s my goal. That’s what this blog is for. There’s countless resources out there to teach you grammar rules, and limitless clever and beautiful templates available as free downloads, but none of those are any good until you know what your document is supposed to do. That’s what we’ll work on here.