Improving the effectiveness of information

In case you missed it: I am writing a new article on Robotics. My writing process consists of the following steps: Set the goal, audience and context Prepare structure, overall storyline and title Write the first draft Review Publish After writing the draft (took me 30 minutes as I knew the storyline and title), I have now arrived in the phase in which I want my article to be reviewed. So here is the deal: I provide you with my draft article below and you will use the comments fields to provide me with feedback, encouragements, corrections and suggestions. Let’s go! Title: Why Every Great Leader Should Love Robotics (draft) I hate repetitive work. When I was a teenager, my two brothers and I had to do the dishes. On two out of every three days, I spent almost 30 minutes on something I hated instead of doing something more meaningful like reading a book, watching television or doing my homework. So how did I feel when my parents decided to buy a dishwasher? Was I afraid th...

In this series of articles you can follow my process in writing a new article on Robotics. In the  first episode  I explained my approach towards writing, the  second article  focussed on setting the goal, choosing an audience and finding the right approach. Now that we have a clear vision on goal, audience and approach, it is time to start setting up the structure. Writing requires a structured approach Writing is all about structuring your thoughts. And although this is a process that most of us do in a more implicit way, it sometimes helps - and is actually best practice - to write down your structure on a very high level. The goal of my article is to change the opinion of the reader towards accepting Robotics as a something that brings value to a business and motivates employees, rather than being limited to reducing FTE. So the structure of my article should be build up around the motives used to build up this case. As I want my article to be shor...

As mentioned in my previous article, writing is a structured, goal-driven activity. In order to get to an effective article, we need to make explicit choices: What is the goal of the article, what do we want to achieve? What is the target audience of the article? What is the context of our article? These choices help us in making the first sketch of our article. They will also influence our writing style, the level of detail and use of technical terminology. Setting the goal Those of you that have followed my articles on Personal Branding  know that I consider any form of professional communication as a goal-driven activity. An effective article supports in my opinion the author's branding and aims for one or more specific goals. These goals can be divided into three categories: Convincing the reader to perform an action. This can for instance be contacting you, ordering a product, signing up for a newsletter or visiting an event. Changing the opinion of the re...

“I wrote the first thing that came out of my head. It just happened to be, the best article in the world.” (Inspired by “The best song in the world” by Tenacious D.) The best articles in the world are shaped in our mind; we dream them, we think them through but we actually never write them. In the past I wrote several articles on Intelligent Automation and Robotics. The first of these series came easy, later on creating a new contribution started to become more and more of a struggle. It’s been more than 6 months since my last article and about time to write a new one. But where to start? And how to finish? In this blog series, I will guide you through my writing process, including my first drafts and potential revisions. How to write an article Writing is a structured, goal-driven activity. I have studied Linguistic Competence (The science of communication – in my case Writing) at University and I have learned the following activity plan: Define your goal Define your a...

We’re at the final episode in this blog series about writing effective articles.  In this series of blog posts I have explored the criteria for a successful article, providing you some best practices, lessons learned and examples from my own work.  The recipe for an effective article So what is the recipe for an effective article? For those of you that just jump in, I would recommend going back to the first blog post. For those of you who have followed me all the way through, let’s summarize it: Start with the definition of your goal: What do you want to achieve with your article? Add to it a clear definition of your audience: Who are you writing for? Now – while keeping an eye on goal and audience – make a sketch of your story: What should the high level structure of your article look like. Detail the building blocks of your story and place them in the high level structure Gather the information you need for your article – in a raw form - and start placing it in ...

As a writer I am always eager to get my articles published. Unfortunately – like with all processes – speeding up things often has a negative effect on the end quality of your product. Taking the time for a serious QA step, pays of in a more effective article. There are two processes that you can use to improve the quality of your article: Review process Pre-test process In an ideal situation you do them both. Get reviewed Although most of us are excellent writers, capable of delivering the message to an audience, it is always a good idea to set up a review process for your article before you post it on your blog or send it in to a magazine. A review process in an ideal world consists of two activities: A peer review by someone who knows the topic: technology, method or issue; A grammar & style review by a trained editor. For the peer review it is important to always provide the goal and audience definition to the reviewers, so they know what you are a...

Until now we have in this series of blogs about writing effective articles focused on the preparing steps before the actual writing. In this post we have finally reached the point where we have been waiting for: the actual writing of our article. So sharpen your pencils and your wits, put that empty sheet of paper on your desk and start writing. Your sheet is already half filled If you have followed the steps described in my previous posts, your sheets is actually already half full. You know your goal and audience and you have created that overall structure of your article, right? Then it is simply a matter of copying that overall structure into your empty page and you have the outline for your article, including the main topics and subparagraphs. A strong article has a strong opening Get your readers involved from the moment that they start reading: your introduction is the key to the overall success of your article. Make sure that the introduction offers a strong statement,...

In the previous episodes of this blog about writing effective articles, we have looked at two things: Defining your goal Defining your target audience Now that we have a clear vision of our goal and know for who we are writing this article, the next step is to create a conceptual model of the article. It is like creating the blueprint for your new home: starting as a sketch and in a number of increments it gets more and more detailed until you have reached the point that you can start decorating the house. Creating the overall plan for your article During my study in Linguistic competence, I learned to represent the structure of my text in an hierarchy. While this may work for informative articles, this is in my opinion not the best approach for goal-driven articles. For a goal-driven article the overall structure should in my opinion look like a process: a serial structure of steps leading towards a conclusion.  In this first rough sketch of your article, you start to defi...

In the previous blog posts, we have talked about the criteria for effective articles and how important it is to set a goal before you start. Now suppose you have decided to write an article about new technology that enables organizations to perform better and make more profit. The goal of your article is to persuade the reader to come to one of the conferences where your company demonstrates this new technology. Would you be interested to hear what your neighbor – a software engineer – thinks of this article? Or the gardener? Or your kids? The audience is part of the goal Aim at a specific audience and define them If you write an article that is supposed to generate new opportunities for your organizations, you are typically aiming at decision makers within a specific industry. So while your neighbor – the software developer – can find your article too shallow and lacking the technical details he is looking for, your targeted audience of decision makers could possible find it...

How to write effective articles? We can’t possibly answer that question if we don’t specify what we want to achieve. As mentioned in my previous post,  if you simply write an article because you feel the urge to do so, you will at best amuse your audience with an intriguing story. But to be effective, you need to know what you want to achieve. A goal-driven approach to writing Writing articles is – or at least should be - a goal-driven activity. You are trying to achieve ‘something’ with your audience and that something is not passive reading. An effective article is in my opinion an article that persuades the reader: • to perform an action • to change his or her opinion • to share your ideas with others If you look back upon the articles that you have read, which ones would you still consider to be worth reading? Exactly: the ones that changed your opinion on a topic, that helped you in your work or that motivated you to discuss the topic with others. So simp...