If you’ve ever written an essay, a work of fiction, or a scholarly article, you didn’t just sit down and start throwing words at the paper. But even if you did, you probably had to go back and do a lot of rewriting, restructuring, and reorganizing.
That’s what we’re going to talk about today:
Organizing and effectively structuring your thoughts when you write.
Look: Stellar writing, no matter what kind it is, allows the reader to follow the threat of your ideas from A to Z. Even something as routine as email can benefit from forethought towards the organization.
How you organize your writing will depend on what kind of writing it is. How you structure an email is going to be different than how you write a novel, but the intent is the same:
Order your thoughts so you can clearly write them down on paper, and the reader can follow them. It’s like expository writing at A*Help: concise, logical, and coherent.
Ready to get this show on the road?
Let’s dive right in.
How to Organize Your Thoughts for Writing
First, we’ll go over five different ways to organize your thoughts for writing.
1. Chronologically: It’s a linear storyline, starting at the beginning and going to the end. This structure works for biographies, documentaries, and other histories that showcase the story’s entire span. Most novels also use this structure.
2. Order of Emphasis: This writing style is used in most forms of journalism and is also good for emails or other office correspondence. The information most essential to the reader goes first, and less urgent details follow afterward.
3. Compare and Contrast: A method used to explain unfamiliar things by comparing/contrasting them to something common. You can do this point by point or use block organization.
4. Generalization to Specifics: A way to organize your thoughts by starting with the generics and moving towards specifics. It can be helpful in long-form journalism, documentaries, and geopolitical analysis.
5. Problem to Solution: In your writing, you’ll detail a problem, including its challenges and complexities, and then go on to solutions that haven’t worked, what you’ve learned along the way, and, if applicable, solutions that have worked and why. This method is perfect for scientific research or scholarly articles.
As you think about your topic and what you’re trying to accomplish with your audience, consider each method that might be most effective for presenting your idea.
It’s a good idea to outline your topic before you start writing, whether you do a detailed outline or jot down bullet points. Seeing the main points of your writing can help you figure out the best way to structure and present the information to your audience.
5 Creative Strategies to Organize Your Thoughts When You Write
Are you looking for something more unusual that can inspire and help you structure your thoughts accordingly?
Below are the five ingenious hacks for writers to beat writer’s block, generate ideas, and structure their texts. They can help if you practice creative writing, blogging, journaling, or storytelling (whether fictional or business and marketing).
Strategy 1: Freewriting
Interesting fact:
Jack Kerouac claimed he wrote the entire novel On the Road using freewriting techniques.
Whether you believe him or not, freewriting is an actionable strategy for unleashing your creativity and organizing your thoughts on paper.
It’s short, 15-20-minute sessions of unceasing writing with no prescribed structure, pauses for thinking, and edits. You follow the impulses of your mind and allow thoughts to appear on paper.
The benefits include creative expression, increased writing speed (with no strict format or structure to follow, you’ll write faster), and defeated writer’s block. It is perfect for copywriters, bloggers, journalists, and anyone working with creative ideas!
How to make freewriting work for you?
- Prepare a few broad topics for your freewriting session beforehand so you know where to start. (15 freewriting exercises from Mark Levy could be a good start.)
- Refrain from fixing any typos or grammatical errors while writing. Let your ideas flow, and you’ll structure and edit them later.
- If you have already prepared an outline for your future text, try freewriting to cover every point of the outline. It can boost your writing productivity.
Strategy 2: Therapeutic Writing
Therapeutic writing is the practice of crafting letters to someone or something special to you, thus observing your thoughts, controlling emotions, and dealing with guilt, anger, sorrow, shame, disgust, or other feelings.
How does it help you structure thoughts for writing?
Look: Most people think in images or impressionistic phrases rather than sentences. When writing letters directly from the brain, you speak to your altered consciousness and create a mind-body connection, which helps you track those images and gain insights.
And you know what? You’ll later use those letters and insights for your texts. (They can even turn into a published book!)
Strategy 3: Mindmapping
Psychologist Tony Buzan developed this strategy in the late 1960s and described it in his book Use Both Sides of Your Brain:
Mind mapping is the practice of building connections between elements. In plain English, you take a keyword (topic) and write down a series of related words, thus developing the topic and structuring it logically and cohesively.
That’s what it looks like in practice:
Strategy 4: Hero’s Journey
Reading can inspire and help you structure your thoughts accordingly. By reading, we usually mean books; by books, we often mean the Hero’s Journey.
What is that?
Also known as the monomyth, the Hero’s Journey is a story structure where a protagonist goes on a quest to overcome obstacles, achieve a goal, and return home transformed.
Most narratives you know follow this structure: Harry Potter, The Lion King, Star Wars, The Matrix, you name it! The purpose of this technique is to create a compelling narrative with a logical structure that resonates with the audience on an emotional level.
You can use this strategy to structure thoughts for your future stories:
Decide on a hero, schematically outline their way to the goal achievement (you can use mind mapping or stickers on your walls) – and voila! You have a complete outline to write chapter by chapter.
Strategy 5: Speaking
If you feel more comfortable thinking when social, try speaking your writing ideas aloud. Like with therapeutic writing, this is an actionable trick for transforming your chaotic sentiments into structured thoughts for your content assets.
So: Once occupied with a topic, try talking to or teaching someone about it. An alternative option could be voice recording or speech-to-text programs:
Talk your ideas and thoughts to them. Thus, you’ll have ready outlines or drafts for your future texts.
Yours?
Thought organization in writing is about arranging your topic’s concepts and details in a meaningful and clear message for your audience.
Structuring your writing before you start putting words down on paper will help you write better, lessen the editing burden, and help you get to your final draft more quickly.
So, it’s your turn:
What method from the above will you try first to motivate yourself to write and structure your thoughts effectively?
