It’s a cliché, but when it comes to organization, you can always do worse than, “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.” While everyone understands the value of a good outline before writing, you can import snippets of that outline to sharpen the clarity of your manuscript. These reminders of the latent structure underneath the text guide your reader and ensure that they take away the fundamental aspects you want them to grasp.
“Tell them what you’re going to tell them…”
One of the easiest transfers between the outline and your writing is the addition of a brief summary of your chapter or article sections at the end of the Introduction (this works for books, as well). It is surprising the number of drafts I see that do not have this feature, and it immediately becomes more difficult to sift through a complex topic to the important elements. You don’t want to go in depth, but laying out the foundation of your argument clearly for your reader in the Introduction helps them to organize in their mind the important elements of your text and separate those themes from the background material. The more technical the argument or the model, the more useful this becomes.
“Tell them…”
New sections frequently provide a change in focus or angle of analysis. They are not sealed off, however, from your outline or other sections of the paper. As you move through the text, explanatory sign posts (think “You Are Here” stickers on maps in malls) can help the reader to adapt quickly to shifts in perspective or analytical range. Often, these sign posts make the best impact when placed at the very beginning of a new, major section of the text, and they can range from a few transition words to a couple of sentences. When placed before the first subsection, 1-2 sentences of text can be an effective roadmap of the section to come, and save you from awkwardly stacking a section heading on top of a subsection marker. The audience has time to breathe before diving in, and so do you.
“Tell them what you’ve told them…”
The other way to bring your reader’s attention subtly back to the structure of your argument is to use transitions throughout the paper. What is the difference between transitions and signposts? While transitions frequently comprise part of a signpost, they are also usually scattered more widely throughout the manuscript. Most of the time you find transitions between paragraphs. They come most often in the form of words like, “Meanwhile,” “Nevertheless,” and “However.” The right transition word (or phrase), however, helps to direct your reader’s focus back to key ideas on which you are elaborating. They keep your reader oriented to the interior space of your text and allow them to move back and forth quickly between conceptual areas and to keep track of relevant information.
While writers are frequently trained to think of the outline as the skeleton of a text and then to hang the “meat” of the prose on top of that, good organization goes much further than an outline. Transitions, signposts, and outlines pace your reader through the document. They reveal the conceptual hierarchy of your manuscript, cue the reader for where to look for information, and heighten the lucidity of the argument overall. A good editor will check these features, but habituating yourself to writing with these elements in mind ultimately forces you to ask: What are the relationships between the key concepts embedded in my research? A good answer to that question lays the foundation for the next topic, narrative voice.
