Chapter Lessons

[Skip Breadcrumb Navigation]

Once you've researched and assembled the information for your document, you must determine how to organize it with your readers in mind. To organize effectively, remember to:

State main ideas at the beginning ("frontloading"), indicate how the document is organized ("roadmap"), and use prose and graphical cues to tell readers where they're going and to signal important points.
Chunk the information into manageable pieces highlighted by subheadings.
Organize sections and subsections the same way using frontloading, roadmaps, reader cues, and chunking.
Construct paragraphs with unifying ideas by connecting each sentence logically to the one preceding it.

When organizing documents for readers in other cultures, consider how people in that culture solve problems, what role context plays in the way messages are delivered, what level of importance the culture places on different types of information, and how messages are routinely organized.

[Return to the Top of this Page]