First phase is a thinking phase and thinking might involve research,
gathering facts, but the most important thing to do is think through the elements
of the problem, what the options are?
What you think is the best course of action?
What are the facts that are relevant to this and
how do you substantiate your facts?
What are the key sources?
And you're doing all of this thinking maybe in groups, maybe individually.
And you should be spending, probably much more time in the thinking phase
than ultimately in the writing phase.
One big problem writers have is that you've got a due date coming up,
you've got a deadline, the pressure's on to get something done.
The first thing you do, you turn on your computer, you want to start writing.
You want to start showing that you're having progress,
that often leads to sloppy thinking.
It leads to drafts that are unorganized and end up needing to be totally redone.
So, you can waste a great deal of time by not investing the time upfront but
to do the thinking.
Now it's important that you then express, organize your thinking into an outline.
It doesn't have to be with a lot of content, but
it's going to show the order of your memo.
You're going to show the basic sections.
Within the sections, you're going to want to outline and
tell here's what all the different paragraphs are going to say.
Here's the order I'm going to present this material in.
Here are the content of the various arguments and
you want to use that outline ultimately during the writing process.
And again, the more time you spend thinking and
the more time you spend outlining,
the easier that somewhat torturous writing process it's going to be.
Writing, so you're going to sit down and you're actually going to have to write it.
You've got your outline and the key thing is to just write and keep going.
Get something down on paper.
You'll have time to examine it later, but
don't worry about each word being perfectly polished about
each sentence being just the way you're going to want at the end.
Because no matter how good a job you do on that first draft,
things are going to change.
You might even end up throwing out paragraphs.
So, why obsess and spend extra hours fine tuning each paragraph
at this initial stage when you might end up jettisoning some of these materials?
So, get a good solid draft down on paper.
That's your core goal, but next is the revision process.
Besides thinking, revision is where all the big work is being done.
So, you're going to hone down your arguments.
You're going to make sure everything's in logical sense.
You're going to look at things and
you're going to revise from a number different levels.
You're going to revise at the paragraph level, making sure all your paragraphs
are in the right work, in a good organized fashion, a flow one to the other.
You're going to go at the sentence level, making sure each sentence is smooth and
as short as can be.
And you're going to go down to the word to word level of trying to make
your grammar and diction is correct, that your word usage,
that you cut as many words out, your verbosity, the weed all of that out.
So, you're going to try to revise at all of these different levels.
You're going to go through this document, one, two, maybe three times.
Once you've got your paragraphs, so you're happy with them,
then you start working on your sentences.
Once the sentences, then you go down to the microlevel word to word,
even down to the individual comma.
Finally, important part that a lot of people forget, ignore,
they discard it for exhaustion proofreading.
You've got to proofread.
Short memos, especially, 750 words, the goal is perfection.
Sometimes it's not attainable, but you should strive for
perfection on anything that you write, a zero mistakes.
