Lesson 5: Organizing and Composing Audience-Centered Business Messages

Overview

The main point of this lesson is that any message has more impact when the facts and ideas have been carefully organized. As you read the chapter; think about the various purposes of business messages and the organizational patterns that are most effective for each purpose. When you finish reading, see whether you can classify the business messages you receive according to their organizational patterns.

Objectives

After reading and studying Chapter 5 you will be able to:

1. explain why good organization is important to both the communicator and the audience.

2. differentiate between the topic and the main idea of a message.

3. discuss five prewriting techniques to help you identify the main idea of your message.

4. compare the direct and indirect patterns for organizing ideas and explain under what circumstances each is generally used.

5. cite seven techniques for maintaining a conversational tone in business messages.

6. discuss how to develop effective sentences and coherent paragraphs.

Good organization helps communicators compose messages more quickly and efficiently. Not only does it help the audience understand and accept the message, it also saves the audience time.

The topic is the broad subject of a message. The main idea makes a statement about the topic, either supporting it or explaining it.

To identify the main idea, you can summarize it in a storyteller’s tour, produce and then sort a random list of ideas, use an FCR worksheet, clarify it by using the journalistic approach, or use a question-and-answer chain to look at the subject from your audience’s perspective.

The direct approach puts the main idea first, followed by the evidence, and is generally used when the audience will want to comply or will be pleased to her from you. The indirect approach puts the evidence first and the main idea later. It is generally used when the audience will be displeased about what you have to say.

To maintain a conversational tone, you should avoid being too familiar, using humor, or preaching. You should use plain English, strong words, and functional and use functional and content words correctly.

To create effective sentences, you should choose the sentence form that fits the thought you want to express, rely on the active voice, emphasize key thoughts, vary sentence length, and use lists. To develop coherent paragraphs, you should include enough information to make the topic sentence convincing and interesting, monitor your paragraph length, arrange paragraphs in a logical order, use transitions to show the relationship between paragraphs, and (where applicable) use headings.

Assignment

Read and study Chapter 5 paying particular attention to Sharpening Your Skills on pages 130-131 and page 144. Complete the self-study quiz to determine if you understand the concepts presented. To reinforce the concepts learned answer the Critical Thinking Questions on page 158, email your responses to your instructor.