Organizing Your Thoughts is an Important Part of All Technical Communication

When it comes down to it, organizing my thoughts and ideas was probably the only thing I really learned in college. Well, the only thing useful towards a career, anyway. Engineers in particular have a hard time expressing themselves in words. So much of what we do involves numbers, units, equations, charts, and programming, that we sometimes find it hard to put words to what is in our heads. So much of communication comes from simply presenting the information in an organized fashion, and we should be able to do that.

At the very minimum, outlines are a great place to start. Outlines can be sorted, rearranged, indented, reorganized. They allow you to start by getting the big ideas down as major headers, and then step down in detail, and sub-detail.

An out line can be an effective presentation on its own, or you can use it to build something more language friendly. Outlines are great starting points for Powerpoint presentations – one slide per line. Outlines can also be a great stepping off point for prose. Believe it or not, my SolidWorks Bibles all started from outlines. Chapter level headings, section level headings, paragraph level, and even sentence level. Yes, a 1200 page book is really just an outline filled in with a lot of details and images.

Keeping thoughts organized is helpful in many ways:

• Prioritize: If you can keep in mind the main goal for a task or project, it is much easier to make decisions about what is important, what gets funded, and what happens first. Project management, scheduling, keeping work moving forward all depend on your ability to decide what is more important than what you are doing right now.
  
• Communicating: If you have already sorted through ideas in your head, it’s easier to influence others when necessary. Other people have a hard time understanding you when the ideas come out in a random or emotional fashion, and presenting a clear train of thought helps walk them through from where they are to where you are.
  
• Writing: For me, writing has become a way of fleshing out an outline, as I mentioned above with respect to the SolidWorks Bible books. Outlines to me are literally the way I approach organized thought. An outline can help sort things chronologically, by causation, or by importance.
  
• Culling ideas: Sorting through ideas in a methodical way can help you separate emotional reactions from real causality. Personal thoughts from universal concepts. Separate the things you can sacrifice for the things that have real value.
  
• Universal Application: The ability to organize your thoughts is not just applicable to design, engineering, technology management and other technical endeavors, but will help you immensely in all areas of your life. It turns out that most legal contracts are done in an outline form to clearly define each idea covered.
  
• Arguments: If you are trying to advocate for a certain point of view, trying to convince someone of something, or even win an argument, making sure you have ideas organized and understand the information you’re presenting. Especially when comparing ideas against someone else’s ideas, you need to have your ducks in a row, and actually understand both sides of the issue.
  
• Visual Organization: Visual organization including charts and drawings can be equally useful. If you put similar kinds of information together in a drawing, it becomes easier to find, and easier to put into context or compare with other similar information. Charts, tables, summaries, all great tools to help you organize and present your information.
  
• Summaries: At the very minimum, a summary at the end of a report can help you present the conclusions you have drawn from the information you present in the body of writing. Summaries can be used in multiple ways – executive summary, conclusions section, TL;DR (too long didn’t read) section, or a fast overview of the top level concepts presented in the presentation.

And my final bit of advice about organizing your data before presenting it to people is to proofread. Proofreading isn’t just for professional authors and editors – it’s for everybody who writes or records or presents information. You – or I at least – always find little corrections when I proofread something. You find better ways to present the ideas, find that you’ve put two words in the wrong order which completely changes your meaning, or you just see that your thoughts look disjointed. I can’t stress this one enough. I usually like to sleep on something before sending it in. When you look at any bit of writing the next day, you’ll often see new things you didn’t see before, or something becomes clearer. Really, proofread. If you can’t sleep on it, get someone else to proofread it.

If you find that you are having a hard time starting a piece of writing, regardless of the topic, or you find you are having a hard time making a decision, try an outline. It will help you organize your thoughts, separate the wheat from the chaff, mixophorically speaking, and may lead you to a resolution you can feel more confident about.