Can Do Writing™: The Proven Ten-Step System for Fast and Effective Business Writing

Chapter 3. Select Facts

Use your document's purpose statement to help you select facts. The purpose statement defines what facts are relevant.

Don't confuse facts with information. Facts are the evidence we can know by study or experience. Information is facts organized to be useful. Later, in Step 4 ("Organize Your Points in a Sentence Outline"), the writer's challenge is to organize facts into information. However, our present task is to select the facts that we later organize.

You select only the facts the reader needs. In the workplace, having too many facts is as big a problem as having too few. With access to the Internet and a few keystrokes in a search engine, you can bury yourself and your audience in facts, mixing irrelevant and relevant facts. In school, we tried to impress the teacher with how many facts we gathered, proving that our research was thorough. In the workplace, we need to impress our reader by carefully selecting the useful facts—a small subset of the facts we know, a small subset of our research.

Don't confuse selecting facts with researching facts. For example, in the laboratory, you follow the scientific method. Having observed a phenomenon, you invent a hypothesis and make predictions; you test your hypothesis with experiments or field observations; you modify your hypothesis to conform to the test results; you repeat the process until your hypothesis consistently predicts your test results. At the end of your experiments, you may have file cabinets filled ...