Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

142 Improve your Communication Skills
expectations, on the spot. When we write, that interaction 
disappears. Many documents fail to give their readers what they 
want. SPQR is the only way you can check that you are producing 
the document that the reader will find useful. 
Look back at Chapter 5 for more details about SPQR. The SPQR 
sequence can: 
• help you validate your message; 
• facilitate a conversation between writer and reader to 
clarify the document’s message;
• form the core of an Introduction in the document. 
Organising information 
In writing, more than anywhere else, communicating well is a 
matter of displaying the shape of your thinking. That shape is 
made up of ideas: the sentences you write. You must arrange 
those ideas into a coherent shape that the reader can see
clearly. 
Your reader can understand only one piece of information 
clearly at a time. To understand your message in more detail, they 
must first break it into pieces, then understand each piece in 
order. You must organise information, therefore, in two 
dimensions: 
• vertically (breaking the message into pieces, grouping 
smaller pieces into larger ones);
• horizontally (organising each group of pieces into an 
order). 
Organising information like this creates a shape that allows the 
reader’s mind to understand complexity in the most natural way. 
The shape you create is a pyramid. 
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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143 Putting it in Writing
First- and second-stage thinking 
We can imagine the process of creating the document’s 
structure as a thinking process in two stages. We have looked at 
the two stages of thinking already as a way of structuring our 
conversations (Chapter 3). Now we can use them to help us 
organise material for a document: