This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
You can access the full web based course at writertraining.online.
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Selecting the content to include in your document
So what you should have now is 2 mind maps of potential content for your document.
Now, as we’ve said before, we’re just trying to explore all the possibilities at this stage and not everything will end up in the document. So now we need to start thinking about what you will put in the document, what’s going to go in and what’s going to go out.
Good judgement about content separates good writers from others
We need to make some judgements about our content. Making judgements about content is really important and I think it’s one of the things that starts to separate good writers from other writers. They make sound judgements about their content.
Use purpose, audience, message (PAM) to prioritise content
Now when you come to make a judgement about anything at all, you need to have something to judge it against. Thankfully, you already have that because you’ve got your purpose, your audience, and your message, PAM.
So you make judgements about content based on that. So as you scout around your mind maps as you look around at each branch on the mind map, you’ll look at each branch and ask yourself: How well is that idea related to the purpose of this document? How important is it to my audience? Is it closely related to my key message?
So you’ll ask those types of questions as you look at every branch on your mind map and that will give you some idea of the priority of the ideas as you come to write your document.
So that is the next task to do in terms of defining your content. Have a look at your mind maps. All the ideas, all the possibilities, all the things you could put in a document and label each branch with some indication of priority. I don’t know, maybe label each branch high and medium and low. And you are making that judgement based on your purpose, your audience and your message.
So after you’ve done that and you have a look at your priorities, all those things you’ve given a high priority to, they’re going to be the big ideas that you’ll include in your document. They may even form the basis for the headings in your document.
And the ideas that you’ve labelled low or medium, well, they are ideas that you’re worth keeping in mind. But we’re not going to emphasise them and perhaps we might not talk about at all.
A simple process to explore content
So this process of generating content is relatively straightforward. We want to do 2 mind maps. Firstly, everything we know – our topic based mind map. Secondly, all the questions that we think our user will have. Then we’re going to make some judgements about what to leave in and what to leave out based on PAM.
I know I’ve covered that fairly quickly in this course. This thinking about your content by using these mind maps and then making some judgements about the content, it might take some effort. It might take you half a day. It could even be something that you do over a couple of weeks. Maybe you devote half an hour to it every day. It will depend on the complexity of your document, and the things that you want to say in it.
So the next task in terms of defining your content is to have a look at your mind maps and label each branch high, medium and low. I’ll stop the video now so that you can do that.
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