The Truth About the New Rules of Business Writing

Truth 12. How to organize is a personal choice

While mapping the content leads you to a natural organization for relatively short and simple kinds of writing—memos, letters, and such—longer and more complicated materials make organizing more of a challenge.

Here are some approaches professional writers use to organize their work when it’s complex. These approaches can be adapted for proposals, reports, articles, and other writing projects where you have a substantial amount of information to pull into shape. Some approaches give you ways to build in the organization early on, saving you lots of time later:

1. Divide and conquer—List your major project components that are likely to make up sections in the final document, and give each a separate ...