You've prepared diligently for your meeting, conference, interview, walk-through, or reading; taken copious notes for what you saw, heard, or read; and selected the most important ones for reporting. Now you need to make sure those key points are in order.
Let's say you were organizing a list of problem areas in a production facility. Here are four ways you can organize them:
- Category – by the three major issues: equipment, staff, and building
- Chronology – within equipment, the time in which the problems appear: compressor, conveyor, and wrapper
- Importance – within staff, their relative value in the production process: assemblers, packagers, and maintenance
- Space – within building, the areas in the facility: shipping, production, and storage
What makes structuring tricky is the range of organizing options available to you. Use them based on what your readers need to know.
***
Read previous installments in this series:
