To sequence them instead so that the mind has to go backward and forward to make connections is simply bad manners, and most readers react by refusing to do so. To summarize, a reader remembers from the top down as a matter of course. He also comprehends more readily if ideas are presented from the top down.
All of this suggests that the clearest written documents will be those that consistently present their information from the top down, in a pyramidal structure. Thinking from the bottom up If. The boxes stand for the individual ideas you want to present, with your thinking having begun at the lowest level by forming sentences that you grouped logically into paragraphs. If you think for a moment about what you actually do when you write, you can see that you develop your major ideas by thinking in this bottom-up manner.
At the very lowest level in the pyramid, you group together your sen- tences, each containing an individual idea, into paragraphs. Let us suppose you bring together six sentences into one paragraph. The reason you bring together those six sentences and no others will clearly be that you see a log- ical relationship between them.
And that logical relationship will always be that they are all needed to express the single idea of the paragraph, which is effectively a summary of them. You would not, for example, bring together five sentences on finance and one on tennis, because their relevance to each other would be difficult to express in a single summary sentence. Stating this summary sentence moves you up one level of abstraction and allows you to think of the paragraph as containing one point rather than six.
With this act of efficiency you now group together, say, three paragraphs, each containing a single thought at a level of abstraction one step higher than that of the individual sentences. The reason you form a section out of these three paragraphs and no others is that you see a log- ical relationship between them. And the relationship is once again that they are all needed to express the single idea of the section, which again will be a summary of the three ideas in the paragraphs below them.
Exactly the same thinking holds true in bringing the sections together to form the document. You have three sections grouped together each of which has been built up from groups of paragraphs, which in turn have been built up from groups of sentences because they are all needed to express the single idea of the memorandum, which in turn is a summary of them.
Since you will continue grouping and summarizing until you have no more relationships to make, it is clear that every document you write will always be structured to support only one single thought - the one that summarizes your final set of groupings. This should be the major point you want to make, and all the ideas grouped underneath - provided you have built the structure properly - will serve to explain or defend that point in ever greater detail.
Fortunately, you can define in advance whether or not you have built the structure properly by checking to see whether your ideas relate to each other in a way that would permit them to form pyramidal groups.
Let me explain why these rules 'must always' apply: 1 Ideas at any level in the pyramid must always be summaries of the ideas grouped below them. The first rule reflects the fact that the major activity you carry out in thinking and writing is that of abstracting to create a new idea out of the ideas grouped below. As we saw above, the point of a paragraph is a summary of its sentences, just as the point of a section is a summary of the points of its paragraphs, etc.
However, if you are going to be able to draw a point out of the grouped sentences or paragraphs, these groupings must have been properly formed in the first place.
That's where rules 2 and 3 come in. If what you want to do is raise your thinking only one level of abstraction above a grouping of ideas, then the ideas in the grouping must be logically the same. For example, you can logically categorize apples and pears one level up as fruits; you can similarly think of tables and chairs as furniture. But what if you wanted to group together apples and chairs?
You cannot do so at the very next level of abstraction, since that is already taken by fruit and furniture. Thus, you would have to move to a much higher level and call them 'things' or 'inanimate objects,' either of which is far too broad to indicate the logic of the grouping. In writing you want to state the idea directly implied by the logic of the grouping, so the ideas in the grouping must all fall into the same logical category.
Thus, if the first idea in a grouping is a reason for doing something, the other ideas in the same grouping must also be reasons for doing the same thing. If the first idea is a step in a process, the rest of the ideas in the grouping must also be steps in the same process. If the first idea is a problem in the company, the others in the grouping must be related problems, and so on.
A shortcut in checking your groupings is to be sure that you can clearly label the ideas with a plural noun. Thus, you will find that all the ideas in the grouping will turn out to be things like recommendations, or reasons, or problems, or changes to be made. How you make sure you get like kinds of ideas grouped together each time is explained more fully in Part Two, Chapters 7, 8, and 9.
That is, there must be a specific reason why the second idea comes second, and cannot come first or third. How you determine proper order is explained in detail in Chapter 7, Questioning the Order of the Ideas. Essentially it says that there are only four possible logical ways in which to order a set of ideas: " Deductively major premise, minor premise, conclusion. The order you choose reflects the analytical process you used to form the grouping. If it was formed by reasoning deductively, the ideas go in argu- ment order; if by working out cause-and-effect relationships, in time order; if by commenting on an existing structure, the order dictated by the struc- ture; and if by categorizing, order of importance.
Since these four activities - reasoning deductively, working out cause-and-effect relationships, divid- ing a whole into its parts, and categorizing - are the only analytical activities the mind can perform, these are the only orders it can impose. Essentially, then, the key to clear writing is to slot your ideas into this pyramidal form and test them against the rules before you begin to write.
If any of the rules is broken, it is an indication that there is a flaw in your thinking, or that the ideas have not been fully developed, or that they are not related in a way that will make their message instantly clear to the reader. You can then work on refining them until they do obey the rules, thus eliminating the need for vast amounts of rewriting later on. It then presents the ideas to the reader, starting at the top and working down each leg.
Because of the specificity of the pyramid rules, if you know what your ideas are before you begin to write, you can relatively easily form them into a proper pyramid. Most people when they sit down to write, however, have only a hazy notion of their ideas if that. Nor should they expect much more. No one can know precisely what he thinks until he has been forced to symbolize it - either by saying it out loud or by writing it down - and even then the first statement of the idea is likely to be less precise than he can eventually make it.
Consequently, you cannot hope just to sit down and start arranging your ideas into a pyramid. You have to discover them first. But the pyramid dictates a rigid s. Let me explain the exact nature of these relationships and then, in Chapter 3, tell you how to use them to discover, sort, and arrange your ideas so that they will be clear, first to yourself and then to your reader.
The vertical relationship 5ome of th e most obv1ous. A good example is what happens when you read. But that vertical follow-on obscures the fact that the ideas occur at various levels of abstraction. Any idea below the main point will always have both a vertical and a horizontal relationship to the other ideas in the document.
The vertical relationship serves marvelously to help capture the reader's attention. Why can we be so sure the reader will be interested? Because he will be forced to respond logi- cally to your ideas. What you put into each box in the pyramid structure is an idea. I define an idea as a statement that raises a question in the reader's mind because you are telling him something he does not know. Since people do not generally read to find out what they already know, it is fair to state that your primary purpose in writing any document will always be to tell people what they do not know.
Making a statement to a reader that tells him something he does not know will automatically raise a logical question in his mind - for example, Why? The writer is now obliged to answer that question horizontally on the line below. In his answer, how- ever, he will still be telling the reader things he does not know, so he will raise further questions that must again be answered on the line below.
The writer will continue to write, raising and answering questions, until he reaches a point at which he judges the reader will have no more logi- cal questions. The reader will not necessarily agree with the writer's reasoning when he's reached this point, but he will have followed it clearly, which is the best any writer can hope for.
The writer is now free to leave the first leg of the pyramid and go back up to the Key Line to answer the original question raised by the point in the top box.
The way to ensure total reader attention, therefore, is to refrain from raising any questions in the reader's mind before you are ready to answer them.
Or from answering questions before you have raised them. For example, any time a document presents a section captioned 'Our Assumptions' before it gives the major points, you can be sure the writer is answering questions the reader could not possibly have had an oppor- tunity to raise. Consequently, the information will have to be repeated or reread at the relevant point in the dialogue.
The pyramid structure almost magically forces you to present informa- tion only as the reader needs it. Let me take you through a couple of examples. Exhibit 2, the first one, is a humorous one, from an article by G. They could be bred They are beautiful to fascinating variations In what way?
They are marvelously fat How is fat How is English beautiful? Present Create Are Symbolizes So English lovely modesty linked that power they curves to in the to the is not deserve to the onlooker possessor land inconsis- be the tent with national kindness symbol How?
Like the Like the chalk beech downs tree Chesterton says that pigs should be kept as pets, the reader asks Why? Chesterton says, 'For two reasons: First, they are extremely beautiful, and second, they could be bred to fascinating variations. Reader: vvhat's bealjtiful about being fat? Che5terton: It presents lovely curyes to the onlooker and it creates modesty in the possessor.
It is clear to you why he says what he says, and there are no more questions in your mind. Consequently, he can move on to the next leg of his argument - that pigs are beautiful because they are typically English. Chesterton: Pigs are linked to the land; this link symbolizes that power is not inconsistent with kindness; that attitude is so English and so beautiful that they deserve to be the national symbol.
Again, you may have a certain prejudice against the sentiment, but it is clear to you why he says what he says. And it is clear because the grouping of ideas sticks to doing its job of answering the question raised by the point above. The last section, about variations, enters the mind equally clearly. You can see this same technique at work in a piece of business writing Exhibit 3. Here we have the structure of a page memorandum recom- mending the purchase of an Internet Cafe franchise.
Will grow faster Will be easy than the industry to absorb Why? Large Little Separate market retail com- business share petition Will have positive financial impact Why? To summarize, then, a great value of the pyramid structure is that it forces visual recognition of this vertical relationship on you as you work out your thinking.
Any point you make must raise a question in the reader's mind, which you must answer horizontally on the line below. The horizontal relationship In deciding what to say on the line below, not only must the points you include answer the question raised by the point above, they must also answer it logically.
That is, they must present a clear inductive or deductive argument, one or the other, but not both at once. These are the only two types of logical relationships possible in a grouping. A deductive grouping presents an argument in successive steps. That is, the first idea makes a statement about a situation that exists in the world today. The second idea comments on the subject or the predicate of that statement, and the third idea states the implication of those two situations existing in the world at the same time.
To move up a level of abstraction from a deductive grouping, you summa- rize the argument, with your summary resting heavily on the final point 'Because Socrates is a man he is mortal. To move upward here, you draw an inference based on your assessment of what is the same about the points - i. Thus, your inference would be something like 'Poland is about to be invaded by tanks. If it is inductive, you know the ideas in the grouping must be logically alike and can be designated by a plural noun.
Given this knowledge, you can see that any one idea in the pyramid implies all the others. Consequently, you could start to build your pyramid anywhere, with a single idea, adding the other ideas as they were demanded - either up or down or sideways. But there is one more thing you need to know before you venture off to build a pyramid of your own. And that is the question to which your document must give the answer. You determine that by tracing the narrative flow of the introduction.
The only way you can be confident of its relevance is to make sure that it directly answers a question you have identified as already existing in his mind. I said earlier that you write primarily to tell people what they don't know. But a reader wants to find out what he doesn't know only if he needs to do so.
If he has no need, he will have no question, and vice versa. Thus, you make sure your document is of interest by directing it toward answering a question that already exists in the reader's mind, or that would exist if he thought for a minute about what is going on around him.
The introduction identifies that question by tracing the history of its origin. Since this history will be in the form of a narrative of events, it should follow the classic narrative pattern of development. That is, it should begin by establishing for the reader the time and place of a Situation. In that Situation something will have occurred known as the Complication that caused him to raise or would cause him to raise the Question to which your document will give him the Answer.
This classic pattern of story-telling - Situation, Complication, Question, Answer - permits you to make sure that you and the reader are 'standing in the same place' before you take him by the hand and lead him through your thinking. It also gives you a clear focus for the point at the top of your document, and thus a means of judging that you are conveying the right message in the most direct way.
Note how much more easily you comprehend its purpose and message when it is forced to fit the narrative mold: The new organization installed in October places full authority and responsibility for running the day-to-day activities of the two divisions squarely on the shoulders of the managers of those divisions. This lllovefrees the Board to deal entirely with the broad matters of policy and planning that are its exclusive responsibility. However, the Board has for so long oriented itself to dealing with short-term operating problems that it is not presently in a position to focus its attention on long-range strategy development.
Consequently, it must consider the changes needed to permit itself to do so. In summary, the introduction tells the reader, in story form, what he already knows or could reasonably be expected to know about the subject you are discussing, and thus reminds him of the question he has to which he can expect the document to give him an answer. The story sets forth the Situation within which a Complication developed that raised the Question to which your document will now give the Answer.
Once you state the Answer the main point at the top of your pyramid , it will raise a new ques- tion in the reader's mind that you will answer on the line below.
Knowing the vertical relationship, you can determine the kind of ideas you need in each grouping i. Knowing the horizontal relationship, you can judge that the ideas you bring together are of a like kind i. And - most important - knowing the reader's question will ensure that all the ideas you do bring together are relevant i. Naturally, you want to go about applying these insights in an orderly way, and that's what Chapter 3 will tell you how to do.
This sense of uncertainty is hardly enhanced by knowing that the ideas you eventually put down, whatever they be, must end up forming a pyramid. Nevertheless, there is a good deal that you do know about your end product that you can build on. To begin with, you know that you will have a sentence at the top of the pyramid that will have a subject and a predi- cate. You also know that the subject of that sentence will be the subject of your document.
In addition, you know that the sentence will serve as the answer to a question that already exists in the reader's mind. And that question will have arisen because of a situation with which the reader is familiar within which a complication developed with which he is also familiar that raised the question that caused you to need to write in the first place. You may even know roughly some of the points you want to make. That is quite a bit to know. You can use this knowledge in building your pyramid either by starting at the top and working down, or by starting at the bottom and working up.
The first way is generally easier than the second, and so should be tried first. The top-down approach. It 1s generally easier to start at the top and work down because you begin by thinking about the things that it is easiest for you to be sure of - your subject and the reader's knowledge of it, which you will remind him of in the introduction.
You don't want simply to sit down and begin writing the opening para- graph of the introduction, however. Instead, you want to use the structure of the introductory flow to pull the right points out of your head, one at a time. To do so, I suggest you follow the procedure shown in Exhibit 4 and described below. What Subject are you discussing? What Question are you answering in the reader's mind about the Subject?
What is the Answer? Match the Answer to the introduction 4. What is the Situation? What is the Complication? Do the Question and Answer still follow? Find the key line 6. What New Question is raised by the Answer?
Will you answer it deductively or inductively? If inductively, what is your plural noun? Structure the support points 8. This represents the box at the top of your pyramid. Write down in it the subject you are discussing. Visualize your reader. To whom are you writing, and what question do you want to have answered in his mind about the Subject when you have finished writing? Next you want to prove that you have the clearest statement of the Question and the Answer that you can formulate at this stage.
What is the first thing you can say about it to the reader that you know he will agree is true - either because he knows it, or because it is historically true and easily checkable? Now you say to yourself, 'So What?
Something went wrong, perhaps, some problem arose, or some logical discrepancy became apparent. What happened in the situation to trigger the question?
The statement of the Complication should immediately raise the Question you have already written down. If it does not, then change it to the one it does raise. Or perhaps you have the wrong Complication, or the wrong Question, and must think again. The purpose of the entire exercise is to make sure you know what Question it is you are trying to answer. Once you have the Question, every- thing else falls into place relatively easily. Let me demonstrate how your thinking would develop by using the tech- nique to rewrite the memorandum shown in Exhibit 5.
It comes from the Accounting Department of a large beverage company in the United States. When the company's drivers deliver the product to a customer, they send back to the Accounting Department a delivery ticket with a set of code numbers, the date, and the amount of the delivery. For its own accounting purposes, it would like to keep daily track of how the bill is mounting up.
It wants to know if it can't keep the delivery tickets along with each delivery, record them on a computer tape, calculate the total, and then send the tape and its check once a month to the headquarters office of the beverage com- pany. This processing is to be accomplished by Big Chief and us on a prepayment basis. We have completed our review of this request and ; our findings are as follows: 1.
Our primary requirement for accepting any National Accounts data from an outside source is that we receive records in a prescribed format: a.
Parent Number b. Outlet Number c. Ticket Number d. Dollar amount of each ticket e. This information could then be incorporated into the Big Chief system for future ease in the processing of ticket data. This data, in the form of a tape, will then be sent to us for balancing pur- poses and at the same time, Big Chief's check, accompanied by a detailed listing of the information on the tape see Report Layout 1 will be sent to the National Accounts lock box.
The tape received by our Data Processing Department will be bal- anced according to our prescribed procedures. The final result of this balancing is that t he dollar amount of the submitted check and the detail of the tape must 'zero balance'. Upon completion, the balanced cash tape will be processed through the National Accounts System.
Had you been he, and used the technique in Exhibit 4, here's what would have happened: 1 You would have drawn a box and said to yourself, 'What Subject am I discussing? To do that I take the Subject and move up to the Situation. The first sentence of the Situation must be a statement about the Subject. When you go to write the introduction out, you will of course in this paragraph explain the nature of the change, but for the purposes of working out your thinking you need only get clear the essence of the point of the paragraph.
You've asked me whether it makes sense. Since that's roughly what you've stated as your Question, you can see that both it and the Answer match, so you have proved that the point you are making is valid for the reader.
What might your reasons be? In the case of so short a document, however, you can probably get away with assuming they are easily available in your mind and will come to you as you get to each sec- tion to write it.
As you can see, the technique has forced the writer to draw from his mind only the information that will be relevant to the reader's question. But in doing so, it has helped push his thinking to deal fully with the question, rather than only partially as in the original example. And of course, if he follows the top-down order of presenting the ideas in writing, the entire message will be remarkably easy for the reader to absorb.
The bottom-up approach. There may be frequent occasions when you find that your thinking is not fully enough developed to work out the top part of the pyramid. Perhaps you can't decide precisely what your Subject is, or the Question isn't clear to you, or you can't sort out what the reader does and doesn't know for sure.
In such cases, simply move down to the Key Line level. If you can think of any Key Line points, fine; but often you won't be able to. Do not despair. You can work out the ideas from the bottom up by following a 3-step process.
As we already knew composing costs are the most important part in all new settings rang- ing from 40 percent in Hardbacks to percent in Paperbacks. At the moment the composing estimators are working on some specific examples I have I given to them.
Every job in composing goes through the same steps basically to ensure a high level of qual- ity. This may explain partly why they are considered uncompetitive for composing simple jobs.
There is a good deal of interest in Aylesbury in finding out what are the facts behind their composing costs. Kennedy is willing to set up an experiment in order to find out: 1 if there are any steps in the composing process that can be eliminated, particulary for certain jobs, and 2 what are the causes behind the apparent low productivity- i.
Composing is at the present moment overloaded. Most of the jobs run behind schedule in the department. The present undercapacity is particularly acute in hand composition. At the moment, they are faced with a new union demand. Also two compositors just left. The department has less people than budgeted and their overtime hours exceed budget by more then 50 percent. It seems feasible to reduce composing costs by: a.
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Steam reforming process hydrogen production pdf. Stirring up fun with food pdf 11 min read. Stirring up fun with food pdf. Terrorism and counterterrorism nacos 4th edition pdf 6 min read. Terrorism and counterterrorism nacos 4th edition pdf. You may have missed. If so, you need The Pyramid Principle. Communicating your ideas concisely and articulately to clients, colleagues or to the management board is a key factor in determining your personal business success. To gain the maximum effect you need to make maximum impact with your ideas upfront.
Presentations are the standard communication tool for this. But one party always has to do the work: either the presenter or the addressee. We explain, writing as fellow practitioners, how to structure complex problems for communication in a logical way and formulate messages that are self-explanatory. Professional communication is based on three elements: suitable content, clear structure and precise graphic design.
In this book we outline an eight-step process that focuses on structure as the fundamental link between content and design. Using a fictional case study that highlights our method, we show how to structure topics so that you can get to grips with even the most complex problems. Obtaining this is often an unplanned, instinctive process. The manager who has a conscious, systematic approach to acquiring intelligence will be better placed to recognize and seize opportunities whilst safeguarding the organization against the competitive risks that endanger its prosperity — and sometimes even its survival.
If this were a story, however, we would list our main points in chronological order. Data is just a bunch of numbers packed into a spreadsheet. What makes it valuable are the learnings within. So, in your reporting document, ask your team to discuss which factors impacted their performance the most and how they can act on the data at hand. For most of us, the Minto Pyramid Principle is the opposite of what our high school English teachers and college professors taught us.
But you must remember that they were paid to read our writing. In the real world, the only currency that people pay to read blog posts and internal wiki articles is their attention. So, start collecting that attention — by cutting to the chase. Skip to content Home.
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