Structure and Organization

Last week a minister contacted me to help him edit his 113,000 word book. His primary concern was that he felt scattered, unorganized, and as if his manuscript was not well organized. When I took a glance through the book, I quickly realized why he felt this way, the points were well made, but the entire book was not well structured.

Although an obviously brilliant man, he had failed to determine both an outline and structure prior to writing his material. So, as I read I noticed that his subjects and subtopics were throughout the text and that, in some instances, he almost seemed to repeat himself. He wrote like a man with a bad case of adult ADD, without focus.

It doesn't matter how bright or educated you are, if you cannot keep your manuscript together so that others easily understand it when they read, then you are not producing salable nonfiction work. An editor looks for writing that people will not only be interested in, but which they will easily be able to follow and appreciate. The writing has to have a built in added value for the reader for it to keep their attention. So, if your writing is difficult to follow, or focus on, or if it doesn't really tell the reader anything he didn't already know, then you can expect difficulty in marketing your work.

What is a Good Writing Structure?

A good writing structure is one that is created immediately and directly behind the thesis or subject sentences. There are plenty of books you can buy from your local bookstore that deal with how to structure a paragraph, an article, or a book. But here in this lesson I will talk more generally of what to put in and what to take out.

The first thing to remember is back to your secondary education days when the teacher taught you about structure funnels. Funnels are still used today although they are used in a looser manner than you may have learned about them. The important thing to remember about structure funnels is how they physically look. For those who have never heard of this term, think oil funnel. The physical shape of your car's oil funnel (the one you use to add oil to the engine), and the inverted funnel are how you need to see your article or book's structure.

Indeed, most all writing opens with general statements narrowed down to specific statements. Then the specific statements are expanded upon. These are followed by a restating of your opening specifications and the concluding statements which essentially restate your thesis.

Your high school English teacher taught you about writing funnels because they are congruent with most peoples' thinking patterns. For nonfiction writing they are essential because they follow logic and most all nonfiction writing has a logical flow to it.

Boxing Yourself In

The purpose of your structure is to box yourself in to a degree. By outlining and creating a structure using thesis, titles, subtitles, and section titles, you box in the subject and the contents in each section or subsection. This has a focusing effect so that your work comes across as articulate. The last thing a nonfiction writer wants to accomplish is a piece where the editor or reader responds with, "He never made his point!"

While your creative side may want to wander all over the subject matter and explore every pig trail that pops into your mind, for nonfiction writing this is an inappropriate and ineffective approach to writing. Save the wandering down memory lane, or any other lane, for the poetry and free flowing stream-of-consciousness works that you write for fun or for friends. One of the main keys to successful nonfiction writing is to state your point, explain your point, and make your point again. To do these things, you must first get to your point and you can never do that wondering down the trails of everything that pops into your mind.



Structure keeps you focused and articulate. It is ten times harder to put a structure into your writing after you have completed it than it is before you write. In fact, reworking an already written piece after it is completed so that it has a cohesive structure is called re-writing and editors charge a good price for it. As a nonfiction writer, you will not become successful by submitting work to your editor that requires him to work for free in order to get your material up to a publishing standard. In the sense that structure limits you, don't be afraid to box yourself in from the beginning. If you forget something, then you can always add an extra point to the thesis and an extra segment in the content. ]]>