Often, the seemingly overwhelming part of writing may stem from the secondary decisions about your communication format (formal versus informal, handwritten versus typed versus typeset, and so forth). Ironically, such flexibility can appear stifling. That doesn't have to happen. Once you learn a few simple rules about putting things down on paper, you'll recognize that these rules don't restrict your creativity and free flow of ideas. Providing yourself with a map — whether it be a rigid formal outline or an informal listing of known purposes for the communication — actually frees your mind to get to work on deciding how best to complete the task.
Learning a few simple steps about how to plan your writing will simplify the task of actually doing the necessary writing. As you will see, you'll follow basically the same steps regardless of what it is you need to write. It all boils down to determining the five Ws and the H:
- Who?
- What?
- When?
- Where?
- Why?
- How?
Determining answers to these questions helps get you ready to write The answers help you see what needs to be said, from beginning to end. In other words, the answers help form the vision for your work.
Think of this stage in much the same way as you would plan a trip. Unless you have an unlimited expense and time budget, you'd never embark on a journey without some preliminary planning. Mastering a few essential steps leads to effective, efficient, and productive quality writing, which results in easy-to-understand communication. Being able to attach that many adjectives to what you write is indeed an attainable goal!