Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

• methodology; 
• acknowledgements; 
• a short guide to the document, section by section. 
Use summaries elsewhere in the document to deliver the shape 
of the material – most importantly, at the start of each section. 
Headings 
Pay close attention to the title and other headings in your 
document. They should have high scanning value: the reader 
should be able to glean a lot of information from relatively
few words. ‘Financial review’, for example, has low scanning 
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153 Putting it in Writing
value. ‘Breakdown of operating costs 2006’ works rather
better. 
Headings should be informative without being too detailed. 
In a report, you might assemble your headings into a contents 
list. Check it to see that the headings give a fair idea of content 
and are not too repetitious. 
Bullet points 
Bullet points are visually very powerful. There is a danger, 
therefore, that you can use them too much. Don’t overuse
them. 
• Construct the points in parallel. All items should be 
grammatically of the same kind. 
• Make the points consistent with the ‘platform’: the text 
that introduces the list. 
• Improve the ‘platform’ so that repeated elements in the 
list need be expressed only once. 
Effective editing 
The aim of editing is to make the first draft easier to read. 
Editing is about making choices. It is potentially endless 
because there is never only one way to say what you mean. It’s 
especially difficult to edit your own work. Ask a colleague to help 
you if you can. Try to cultivate an innocent eye. Take a break 
before editing so that you are better prepared to look at the text 
afresh. 
Edit systematically. Editing word by word is time-consuming 
and may be counterproductive. To edit efficiently, work on three 
separate levels in this order: