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.
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So our big principles around organising information in a document are to organise for the user. And that’s always the thing we need to keep in mind. And the ways we will do that is we will do that by chunking content, layering information and organising point first.

They’re the big ideas, the big things to think through.

Let me just take you through some other possibilities in terms of organising structures.

You could use a topic, subtopic, type structure and that has similarities to chunking really. This is a way we might be able to organise the content and the indoor air fact sheet by talking about a topic and a subtopic. That’s a possibility.

You can organise information chronologically. That’s particularly useful if you need to tell the history of something either going backwards or going forwards. That’s fine, that can be useful in some situations. If you’re writing process type information, you will always organise it chronologically. You’ll talk about step 1, Step 2, Step 3, and so on.

You can organise by function, you can talk about Filtering wastewater and Removing graffiti, for example

You could organise content by product. You could talk about wheels and engines. If you’ve ever read a car manual, that’s how they’re organised.

You can even organise things alphabetically. But I think it’s probably the worst way of organising something, because I have to figure out what was the word that you used to talk about this topic, but it’s a possibility.

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