145 Putting it in Writing Managing detail Building a pyramid creates a discipline that allows you to
work out how much information to include in your document
and how to order it.
Pyramid building always proceeds by division. Each idea
provokes a question to which you must have at least two answers
– and preferably not more than six. This process of division by
question and answer continues until an idea fails to provoke a
question with multiple answers. It can stop if:
• an idea does not provoke a question from the reader; • an idea provokes a question that has only one answer. It should never be necessary to create a pyramid containing
more than four levels: message, key point, sub-point, minor
point.
You must decide how to order ideas in each group. You can
order ideas in terms of:
• rank (size, importance, priority, relevance); • process steps; • chronology; • logical reasoning. Sometimes the order of ideas is not critical.
Constructing an outline The final stage of planning your document is constructing an
outline. This transforms your pyramid into text that you can
expand into a first draft.
An outline is the design of your document. It gives an
overview of the entire document in miniature. Here’s how to
write an outline.
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146 Improve your Communication Skills • At the top of a page, write your message sentence, headed Message . • Follow this with a headed Introduction : SPQR, briefly stated (three or four lines at most). • Write each key point sentence, numbered, in order, with
