So far I talked about purpose and audience awareness.  I move now to the actual process of  making your thought visible.  Once the writer has determined his or her purpose and analyzed the audience(s), the next step is to write a rough draft.

A rough draft is appropriately characterized by those two words: what you produce should be rough and a draft.  There are basically two schools of business writing.  One has it that “writing is a form that thinking takes,” and this approach has the benefit of dissolving writer's block and producing a useful rough draft quickly.  A prominent proponent of this school is Dr. Barrett Mandel, founder and president of Successful Writing Associates, a New York based consulting firm that specializes in writing training for business and the professions.

A second approach has it that to write anything well one must separate one’s thinking from one’s writing, and this school is characterized Barbara Minto, author of The Pyramid Principle.  This approach is useful for those writers who prefer to outline before they begin drafting.

For writers who are hampered by writer’s block or who find the process of outlining almost as daunting as writing itself, a more expedient approach is, with one’s purpose and audience in mind,  simply to plunge into the act of writing.  The key to doing this successfully is to write without stopping for a periods of, say, ten minutes once one sets fingers to keys.  Do not stop to correct, fix, or cogitate about the apt word; do not trouble with the niceties of spelling, punctuation, grammar, or what have you.  Simply write, allowing to emerge on the screen whatever emerges.  And if looking at the screen while drafting is troublesome, turn it off for those initial ten minute periods.

As mentioned, this approach has several benefits: first, the act of writing itself dissolves writer’s block, and second, in a matter of a mere ten minutes enough of one’s thinking has been made visible so that it can be outlined and the writer can see what’s present, what’s missing, and begin the key step of revising.  Keep in mind that virtually all decisions made during the revising stage should be made with reference to your purpose and your audience.  It’s during the revising stage that you determine the order in which you want your thinking to enter you reader’s mind.

For those you you who prefer to outline before drafting, or need to organize fairly long documents, the following may be helpful.  Keep in mind that a set of ideas can be ordered in four possible logical ways:

        Deductively (major premise, minor premise, conclusion)

        Chronologically (first, second, third)

        Structurally (Boston, New York, Chicago)

        Comparatively (first most important, second most important, third most important)

The order you choose reflects the analytical process you used to form the grouping.  If it was formed by reasoning deductively, the ideas go in argument order; if by working out cause-and-effect relationships, in chronological order; if by commenting on an existing structure, the order dictated by the structure; and if by categorizing, order of importance.  These four activities--reasoning deductively, working out cause-and-effect relationships, dividing a whole into its parts, and categorizing are the only analytical activities the mind can perform, and, consequently, the only orders it can impose.

A word of caution: These organizational principles are useful as tools of analysis, not as tools of production.  My recommendation is that you draft first,  then perform an organizational operation on what you've written.  See Organization.