Getting the structure right: The Paradigm

Those are the guiding principles, the hallmarks of good structure, or perhaps the goals we are trying to score. And to that extent they are useful. But they don't tell us how to score the goals. To find out how to do that, we need to have a paradigm and a process, and we need to be persistent.

The paradigm
My favourite paradigm for the writing process was developed by Dr Betty S. Flowers and is called "madman-architect-carpenter-judge".
[Betty S. Flowers, Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process, 44 Proceedings of the Conference of College Teachers of English 7-10 (1979). I only know Dr Flowers’s work through an article by Bryan A Garner, Using the Flowers Paradigm to Write More Efficiently, TRIAL Journal of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, May 1997, p 79.]

In her paradigm, Dr Flowers separates the writing process into four distinct stages, each requiring the writer to use a quite different approach and to adopt a quite different personality. The four personalities are:

* The madman who brainstorms, takes notes, is enthusiastic, experimental, and above all is creative;
* The architect who reviews the information that the madman has created and gathered, and uses it to develop an outline of the document;
* The carpenter who fleshes out the structure by writing the text and producing the first (however many) drafts; and
* The judge who edits and reviews drafts.

As Dr Flowers points out, when applying the paradigm, it is important to keep the roles separate, to give each personality its turn without allowing the other personalities to interrupt. For example, the judge must not be allowed to interrupt the madman:

[The judge has] been educated and knows a sentence fragment when he sees one. He peers over your shoulder and says "That's trash!" with such authority that the madman loses his crazy confidence and shrivels up. You know the judge is right; after all, he speaks with the voice of an English teacher. But for all his sharpness of eye, he can’t create anything.
[See Flowers at page 7, or Garner at page 79]

The Flowers paradigm is an excellent way to conceptualise the writing process. More than that, it provides us with a methodology that helps us to begin at the beginning and to go through the middle until we to get to the end. It's fun too.

However, in the context of this article, it sort of begs the question: what do we actually do when we are in architect mode?

Having taken off our madman's hat and put on our architect's hat, we see before us a pile of information: notes, mind-maps, articles, books (probably blossoming with yellow post-it notes) and perhaps a few pages of hastily written text. What the architect has to do is use all that information to create a useful outline for the document - a structure that the carpenter can develop into a full-blown draft.

As architects, we have to get the structure right. But how do we go about it? Having found a paradigm, what process can we follow?