Crafting Your Message: Clarity and Impact
Learning Objectives
1. Use effective reading strategies to collect and reframe information from a variety of written materials accurately.
iv. Separate main ideas from subordinate ideas in written materials.
2. Apply outlining techniques to begin drafting a document.
3. Plan, write, revise, and edit short documents and messages that are organized, complete, and tailored to specific audiences.
iii. Apply standard patterns of organization.
Once you’ve clarified the organizing principle of your message, outlining with hierarchical notes helps you plot out the bare-bones structure of the message’s full scope so that you can flesh it out into full sentences and paragraphs shortly after. Outlining helps you get past one of the most terrifying moments in any student’s or professional’s job, especially when beginning a large writing project: writer’s block. Even after completing all the other steps of the writing process explored above, freezing up while staring down a blank screen is an anxiety-driven mental bottleneck that often comes from either lacking anything to say because you haven’t researched the topic, or thinking that your draft writing has to come out perfectly just as the reader will see it by the end of the process. It absolutely doesn’t. Drafting is supposed to produce a sketchy, disappointing mess only because the goal at this stage is to get ideas down fast so that you can fix them up later in the editing stage.
Outlining is a structured brainstorming activity that helps keep you on track by assigning major, overarching ideas and relatively minor, supporting points to their proper places in the framework of your chosen organizing principle. At its most basic form for a three-part message, an outline looks like the following:
- Opening
- Point 1
- Point 2
- Body
- Point 1
- Subpoint 1
- Subpoint 2
- Sub-subpoint 1
- Sub-subpoint 2
- Sub-sub-subpoint 1
- Sub-sub-subpoint 2
- Sub-sub-subpoint 3
- Sub-subpoint 3
- Subpoint 3
- Point 2
- Subpoint 1
- Subpoint 2
- Subpoint 3
- Point 1
- Closing
- Point 1
- Point 2
You can add further points in the body and, as shown in the middle of the above outline template, subdivide them even further with lowercase roman numerals, regular numbers, lowercase letters, etc. depending on the size of the document and the support needed. Even when drafting a short email, throwing down a few point-form words as soon as you think of them, arranged in the basic three-part message structure, can help you get started, especially if you don’t have time to write the full email as soon as you think of it (or respond to one as soon as you read it) but nonetheless need to get some quick ideas down before you forget so that you can expand on those points later when you have time. For instance, if it occurs to you that subscribing to a snow-removal service might be a good idea and quickly draft an email on the weekend while doing several other winterizing chores, it may look like the one in the left column of Table 2.1 below.
Table 2.1: Brief Message Outline as a Basis for an Email Draft
| Message Outline | Email Message Draft |
|---|---|
|
Greetings! I am interested in your snow-removal service this winter.We’re at 5034 Tofino Crescent, and our driveway can fit four cars, so how much would that come to for the prepaid service?
Alternatively, if we decide to do the snow removal ourselves for most of the winter but are in a jam at some point, is it possible to call you for one-time snow removal? How much would that be? Also, do you offer any discounts for first-time customers? Warm regards, Christine Cook |
However numbered, the hierarchical structure of these notes is like the scaffolding that holds you up as you construct a building from the inside out, knowing that you will just remove that scaffolding when its exterior is complete. Once the outline is in place, you can likewise just delete the numbering and flesh out the points into full sentences, such as those in the email message in the second column of Table 2.1 above, as well as add the other conventional email message components.
The specific architecture of the outline depends on the organizing principle you’ve chosen as appropriate for your writing purpose. Table 2.2 below shows how the outline for each of the first three principles keeps each piece organized prior to being fleshed out into sentences.
Table 2.2: Outline Possibilities Based on Organizing Principles
| Organizing Principle | Outline |
| 1. Chronology & 5W+H |
|
| 2. Comparison & Contrast |
|
| 3. Pros & Cons |
|
Outlining is essential for organizing projects like presentations or blog posts. For a 20-minute presentation, start by outlining your main topic, which helps you structure the full scope of your speech. This outline can then be expanded into a detailed script, ensuring smooth transitions between points and subpoints. If your first script takes 15 minutes to read aloud, you can expand it by adding more detail or additional points to reach the 20-minute mark. Conversely, if your script runs for 30 minutes, you’ll need to pare it down by cutting about a third of the content.
For a blog post, outlining similarly helps you map out your key points, ensuring your writing stays focused and coherent. As with presentations, scripting or drafting based on your outline prevents you from spending time on material that may later be cut or reorganized. By outlining first, whether for a presentation or blog post, you streamline your work and stay on track, ultimately saving time and effort. Watch this video to find out more about blogs.
Key Takeaways
Begin your draft by outlining the major and minor points in a framework based on the organizing principle appropriate for your purpose so that you can flesh it out into full draft sentences after.
Crafting Your Message: Clarity and Impact was adapted from the original source: CMN279 – Communication at Work Copyright © 2019 by Jordan Smith which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.