Writing a plan, a report or an analysis can be a huge hurdle for people who don’t consider themselves writers. But in our information-driven economy today, it’s increasingly important. Here’s a strategy to help you make your next writing project more manageable: get a GRIP.

It starts with the two basic rules of writing:

1. Know what you want to say. Be able to sum up your main message, your thesis statement, in one clear sentence.
2. Know your audience. Know whom you’re writing or speaking to. What motivates them? What are they interested in? What will they likely agree with, and what will they argue about? Why should they care about what you have to say? And if you’re writing advertising or sales messages, why should they do what you will ask them to do?

Write down your answers to both questions before you go any further. Then, get a GRIP. Before you write your next letter, or blog post, or proposal, or novel, before you jot down that spectacular opening sentence that came to you in a dream or in the shower, write down these four points.

You can write them on the computer, but often I find using a nice pen or fine marker on a good pad of paper is more satisfying.

G for goal:

What are you trying to achieve with the document (print or electronic) you’re writing? What do you want the readers to do, what action do you want them to take, when they finish reading it? Buy more of a product? Feel better about your organization? Write an email to their elected representative? Or maybe you know a story to tell that you think is important for some of your community or the world to read. State your goal as clearly and as simply as possible.

R for readers:

From rule #2 above, who are the people who will read the document? Who do you want to read your document? What motivates them? Why should they read your document? And how will doing what you want them to do benefit them? How will your idea make them better off?

In short, what’s in it for them?

The more you know about your audience, the better you can make your message. Do some research. What interests this audience? What makes them pay attention? What do they need that they don’t have? What do they not want to have? What makes them happy, what makes them mad, what makes them turn and stare, goggle-eyed.

There are some things that all people, everywhere, always, want: food, sex, safety, shelter. But the more specific you are, the more effective you can be.

I for idea:

The thesis statement, what you want to say, the main point in one clear, grammatically correct sentence. Take your time writing this. It should sum up the whole document in a direct, active voice.

This is perhaps the hardest part of all. Don’t be afraid to try it several times. Write it down, change it, cross it out, start over, try it from a different angle. Change the order of your words and phrases. Don’t worry if it’s a long sentence. It can be a complex-compound sentence with subordinate clauses and qualifying phrases, but it has to be a single, grammatically-correct, complete sentence. One thought.

I know, it’s hard. But you can do it.

P for plan:

After you have identified your audience and clarified your message, make a plan, or an outline of all the other information you will need to bring your audience from your thesis statement to taking the action you want them to.

Even though your main message, your thesis, is one sentence, you’ll probably need more than one sentence to convince your readers to achieve your goal. If that weren’t necessary, there Apple wouldn’t have such an extensive website.

Write down all those points. Then put them into some kind of logical order. It can be chronological, reverse chronological, general to specific, specific to general or whatever makes sense. But have a sequence of ideas that will take your reader from beginning to action.

This is the part that all my college students hated the most. After you figure out why you’re writing, whom you’re writing for and what your point is, make an outline.

An outline is like the frame of a house. I always start with a “scratch outline”—just a list, in no particular order, of all the ideas I want to get into the document to support the main idea. I try to make sure I have all the facts that I have found in my research, all the ideas I had as I was working on the other steps, all the arguments for and against the main idea.

Get them all down on paper or screen, then put them into order. Play the Sesame Street game: “some of these things belong together.” Look for categories and items within categories. Then, put them in a logical order.

A lot of proposals use a problem-solution order: “Do you have bad breath? Use Scope!”

In a future post, I’ll present some exercises to help you with making an outline. But for now, I think that’s enough.

Summary

Before you want to write, you have to know what you’re writing and you have to know whom you are writing for.

Before you write the first line, get a GRIP: write down your goal, your reader, your main idea, and your plan.

And when you get stuck (all we writers get stuck from time to time), go back to those first two rules: what am I saying? and whom am I saying it to?

I’ll blog with you again soon. Keep checking back here!