Good Structure is Vital
To help the reader follow your reasoning, it is critical to structure your writing well
Sometimes when I first read an article submitted to me as editor for Japan Harvest, I find it confusing. This can be because the subject matter is difficult or the writer hasn’t started well, but often it is because there are structural problems.
Good structure is important, even in a short piece of writing. You need to lead your readers through your article smoothly, without jerking them from topic to topic. Information should be given to your readers as they need it. One sign of bad structure is lots of brackets, dashes, and asides that should have been presented earlier.
Throughout an article, use transition words like “in addition”, “besides”, “however”, “despite”, and “though”. These link your sentences and paragraphs together and give your work structure.
There are different types of structure you can use. Chronological is the most common and easiest. Depending on your topic, step-by-step is another way to give logical progression to your work. Newspapers use an inverted pyramid approach, where they give the most important information at the top but often don’t have a satisfying conclusion. You can write from general to specific, or you can frame your work with anecdotes at the beginning and end. Comparison, pros and cons, or cause and effect also can be used to structure an article.
Before starting to write an article, ask yourself these questions about structure:
- What type of structure fits my topic?
- What is my main idea?
- Are there sub-ideas that flow logically from the main idea?
- How are the ideas connected?
- What conclusion do I want to lead my readers to?
Some questions to ask yourself after you’ve written something include:
- Does it have a clear beginning, middle, and end?
- Are the ideas and actions connected to each other?
- Is there a logical progression from beginning to end?
- Does it feel finished?
- Does it feel jerky?
Here is a piece of advice that may inspire you: consider rewarding your reader in the middle of your piece of writing. Place “gold coins” along the way. Anything that rewards the reader is a gold coin: a small anecdote, a startling fact, or a telling quote. After all, “The easiest thing for a reader to do,” argued famed editor Barney Kilgore, “is to quit reading.”1
Thoughtful writers look after their readers by minding the structure of their writing.
1. Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 156.