by Robert Levine

Created on: October 10, 2008   Last Updated: April 03, 2012

When beginning a writing project, devote some time to generating ideas and organizing them into a writing plan. It simply makes sense to chart out what you want to do with your subject and material before starting your draft. Writing your plan down protects against the unreliability of memory. Most professionals juggle many projects simultaneously; other tasks might intervene between formulating a writing plan and starting a draft. The careful professional won't run the risk of losing ideas for writing after turning his or her mind elsewhere momentarily.

Back when I was engaged, my fiance and I had an argument about how best to get from the home of a friend of hers in a neighborhood of winding, convoluted streets to the nearest subway station when we had to arrive somewhere else by a certain time. Since we had no idea what the most direct route would be, I insisted on taking the only way we knew, which went partially in the opposite direction but was sure to get us there. My fiance thought it better to head out blindly in the direction of the subway despite the likelihood that any street we ended up on would eventually turn away from it, getting us lost and costing us more time in the long run. I felt her strategy so poor that I began my journey without her. She ended up following me. Trying to plan the course of your writing in the midst of drafting is like trying to navigate those unfamiliar circuitous streets by dead reckoning: regardless of how auspicious your beginning, you can never know whether your progression of ideas will take you where you need to go. (Any wonder my fiance and I didn't marry?)

"The most immediate way to begin exploring a topic is also the easiest and most familiar: talk it over with others," comment Angela Lunsford and Robert Connors in The New St. Martin's Handbook. Diana Roberts Wienbroer et al. give some guidelines for this approach in Rules of Thumb For Business Writers: "Ask the person just to listen and not say anything for a few minutes. As you talk, you might jot down points you make. Then ask what comes across most vividly." You could also ask your listener for more in-depth feedback about how to organize your material, connections or similarities among the points you make, and possible lines of argument, especially if he or she knows a fair amount about your subject. One potential drawback of relying on discussion to generate ideas, though, is that due to the often specialized nature of business writing, you may have trouble

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