Does It Resume?
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- October 13th, 2009 |
- Comments
I go finished an interesting writing exercise regularly: I accept magazine articles and compose abstracts of them for a newsletter client.
The challenge involves action an article, one that normally ranges from 1,000 to 3,000 words, and condensing it into a few hundred words. That means I need to get the essence of the article squarely in my sights and to compose about it in my own words.
When I go finished that exercise, I’m amazed at the number of articles, many from highly respected business magazines, that don’t have internal integrity.
An article has internal integrity when the writer started out with a central idea, developed it advantageously, and reached a conclusion involving that idea. For example, the writer might start with an anecdote, exploitation the anecdote to illustrate a problem.
She so goes on to explain why this problem deserves our attention. That’s followed by one or various potential solutions, and the pros and cons of each one, along with a recommendation or cardinal. She concludes the article by summarizing the problem, the alternative solutions, and her recommendation so links back to the opening anecdote. That’s just one account development model, but one that works.
As I have, many articles don’t have that kind of integrity. Any miss one or more parts of the model, others get them in the wrong order, and any don’t have a model at all, just the non-fiction equivalent of stream-of-consciousness (a fiction model).
You can ensure your writing has internal integrity — whether for memos, articles, instructions or anything else — by action measures before or after your compose. Perhaps the most familiar strategy is the preliminary outline. Before you start writing, you begin the elements you’ll address.
Another possibility is to go back to your message afterward and compose a abbreviated abstract, and ask yourself whether or not it makes meaning. Does the account flow logically and clearly? Do you accompany any part of your model that might be missing?
A 3rd possibility is just to suspend your writing for a few days, and so look at it later with fresh eyes.
Whichever you model your choose, and that’s mostly a matter of your personal communication, your writing will get better results if it has internal integrity.