How To Organise The Information In Documents: The Guiding Principles - Part 2

Here then are the goals, the guiding principles:

* put the main message first;

* put closely related material together;

* put material in an order that makes the best sense to the reader;

* use headings liberally and rigorously;

* make sure that pieces of information with comparable heading levels have comparable weight, and comparable levels of importance; and

* use a numbering system which forces you to draft clearly — even if you don't use that numbering system when you print the document.

These principles are discussed in considerably more detail in a later part of this series of articles. But for now, just keep them in mind as we review some documents.

The Problems
Let's look at three examples that illustrate the problems created by poor structure. Those problems are many and varied. Usually they result from an utter failure to focus on things from the reader's point of view.

Example 1: Voicemail Instructions
This ugly little document was handed to me when I started work somewhere. It's for people to pin up near their phone to help them when they need to turn their voicemail on.

5. CALL FORWARDING

You will need to instruct voice mail when you would like your phone answered. This can be done via 3 call forward options:

CANCEL EXISTING FORWARDING

BUSY CALLS | Press # 3 | Hang up

NO ANSWER CALLS | Press #6 | Hang up

ALL CALLS | Press #9 | Hang up


SET FORWARDING TO VOICE MAIL

BUSY CALLS | Press # 3 76999 | Hang up

NO ANSWER CALLS | Press #6 76999 | Hang up

ALL CALLS | Press #9 76999 | Hang up

It's not a pretty sight! The language isn't too flash either. But what I want to focus on is the structure — the order in which the ideas are presented.

First, the results of some real-life research — my experiences as a user of the sheet. For my first few days in the organisation, I never got one voicemail message, even though several friends told me that when they rang me to see how I was doing in my new job, the phone rang out. I assumed I'd done something silly, and so I reset my phone to voicemail. Still no messages.

Clearly, something was wrong. I examined the sheet more carefully and realised that every time I'd tried to turn voicemail on, I'd actually turned it off.

Why? Because I didn't read the sheet very carefully, and I had assumed that the sheet dealt with things in what I thought was a logical order:

*first, how to turn voicemail on; and

* second, how to turn voicemail off.

I paid the penalty for not reading the sheet carefully.

But lots of readers don't read carefully. We need to create documents that people can't misread — even if they aren't really concentrating and don't read every word carefully. It's a tall order.

Let's look at the voicemail instruction sheet again:

* "Cancel existing forwarding", which means "Turning your voicemail off"

is dealt with before

* "Set forwarding to voicemail", which means "Turning your voicemail on".

Surely, that order is counter-intuitive? Surely, a new user of any machine (or a new user of a machine's — dare I say it — "functionality") wants to know how to turn it on before they want to know how to turn it off? Not only that, but they expect to be told the information in that order.

By the way, you can turn voicemail on even if the phone is already set to some other call forwarding. You don't have to turn off the call forwarding first — I checked.