If you stop and think about what we might’ve learnt at school in relation to writing down our ideas, it’s amazing that we ever manage to master the art of report writing, or indeed any other kinds of business communication.
Of course, the basic units of information we all learn to construct are sentences and paragraphs. But when you try to define exactly what a paragraph is, you begin to realise we are talking about a fairly poorly-defined unit of information.
Probably the rule of thumb that we all learnt at school was when we start a new topic, we should begin a new paragraph. Now this is a good starting point, but we actually need a lot more help than this. What about if your topic is particularly long and complex. Is it really okay to write a paragraph that’s 20 sentences long? Surely not. In fact, if you ask anyone how long a paragraph should be, no-one can really give you a definitive answer.
So, can we be more precise and more effective? Does the paragraph need replacing with a different unit of information? Instead of thinking about a somewhat ill-defined unit of information, how about one that is clearly defined, has some very clear guidelines and is, essentially, a modular stand-alone unit?
If you think that sounds like a promising idea, you might be wondering what we would need to do to achieve such a thing. Not that much, actually. Here are our top tips for writing concise, modular units of information. And by the way, they aren’t just some pie-in-the-sky, fanciful notion. Applying them really does work:
One idea or purpose at a time
Sounds simple doesn’t it, but examine most paragraphs and they usually contain one or more ideas or purposes. Finished with one idea? Stop there and start a new unit.
Measure how long each unit is
I’m not talking about rulers, calculators or compasses here. What I am talking about is having a pre-defined upper limit that you aim not to go beyond. I would recommend using 7 as the magic number. Put simply, anything more than about 7 sentences long is probably too long and too much for your audience to comfortably process.
Got lots you need to say? Examine your paragraph carefully, you’ll probably be amazed to find there are several ideas or purposes lurking in that great long paragraph you were about to write.
Keep your sentences short
Within each unit, it’s really important to keep sentences short. This really cuts down fluff and forces you to express your ideas more precisely. By the way, your audiences will really appreciate you doing this.
Increase advance organisation
You may not want to give each and every unit a short, meaningful heading (although research indicates this is a highly effective way of increasing readability). But you ought at least to consider increasing your use of headings. Avoid the common mistake in most long reports which usually only contain the bare minimum of headings.
