Writing: Restructure

Structural problems are the hardest to see from inside the piece — because from inside, structure is invisible. The writer always knows where they're going; they know the context, the backstory, why the claim matters. The reader only knows where they've been. The result: pieces that are perfectly clear to the writer and impenetrable to the reader, because the reader doesn't have the context that makes the opening make sense, doesn't know that the important claim is on page four, and has no way to distinguish the load-bearing material from the scaffolding.

Three structural failures account for the majority of structurally broken pieces:

Burying the lead: The piece starts with context, background, or setup rather than the claim or finding. The writer needed to write the setup to arrive at the claim. The reader doesn't need it — or needs a fraction of it, after the claim has been stated.

Wrong ending: The piece stops before it resolves. The real insight is in the second-to-last paragraph. The final paragraph is a softening or a retreat. Or the piece stops at the conclusion of the argument but before its implications — leaving the reader with the logic but not the meaning.

Wrong proportion: The piece spends three pages on the least important point and half a page on the most important one. The proportion reflects the order in which the writer discovered things, not the order of their importance.

All three failures have the same cause: the structure was not designed for the reader — it was inherited from the process of writing.

Your Process