Organizing Your Data to Write Better Copy

Last quarter I talked about interviewing / gathering
data. So now you’ve got several thousand words of notes,
hopefully digitally recorded. What comes next?

GETTING ORGANIZED
I suggested organizing your interview questions into 4
groups. I’m going to label them for you A, B, C, D.
·
·what is the business problem? = A
·
·what is the high level solution? = B
·
·can you tell me more about the solution? = C
·
·why should I trust you (as my vendor?) = D

Any decent piece of writing has a beginning, a middle and an
end. So before you start editing / writing you want a map, to
show you where you are going. Take a blank sheet of paper,
write four major headings and label them A, B, C, D, as above.

Now read your notes. When you find data relevant to “A”
(the business problem), underline that copy and mark a big “A”
in the margin (in red?) . Keep working through until you have
marked up relevant copy for all four sections of your piece.

You will be leaving out anything that does not seem suitable
as you go.

THE CUT AND PASTE JOB
Next comes a cut and paste job. Group together all the “A”s,
then the “B”s, “C”s and “D”s.

Next, take a look at all the ideas you have in the A group.
It helps if you take a new sheet of paper and write a list of
the ideas or facts in the A group. Now prioritize. Be ruthless.
And trust your first instinct. If an idea seems to leap out and
have life, put it first. The less important ones come later.
Weed out any repetition or weak data. Now you work
on flow. Do you have a logical flow of ideas that your reader can
follow? Are you telling him/ her a story that you yourself could
believe in?

You will go through the same exercise with the remaining
blocks of notes, ie “B”,“C” and “D”.

EDITING IS PRIORITIZING
Editing is prioritizing. Often you will want to limit a list
of ideas to 3. Three has a flow to it. And is about as much as
any reader or listener can grasp at one sitting.

Finally you polish. Now you are reading for flow or
musicality.You are cutting out superfluous ideas and words.

This is the long way to write.

THE SHORT WAY TO WRITE
The short way is to sift and prioritize all your notes in
your mind ie you turn on your thinking tool. The key idea will pop
into view, and hey presto, you begin writing about that one. You
have a feeling for what comes next and what after that. You
understand how to prioritize your ideas. Soon with a bit of
jiggling ideas around the page, your story has a beginning, a
middle and an end.

You can teach yourself the short way by writing the long way,
again and again. Or by turning copy round in the middle of the
night for an 07.00am deadline as I often had to do as a newspaper
feature writer.

“When we encounter a natural style, we are astonished and
delighted: for we expected to see an author, and we find a man.”
Blaise Pascal. Quoted with thanks to John R. Trimble, Writing
with Style published by Prentice Hall.

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