Online Technical Writing:
Power-Revision Techniques—Structure-Level Revision



For lack of a better phrase, "structure-level revision" refers to the techniques you can use to improve the content of a document, make it better organized, and facilitate readers' ability to follow and understand it. At this level, we're not tinkering with commas or subject-verb agreement—we're tossing around whole paragraphs, adding whole new sentences, deleting chunks of useless text, reorganizing sections, and adding various kinds of signals to make things easier to follow.

Specifically, this section on structure-level revision techniques covers the following:

Check contents

One of the most important ways you can review a rough draft is to check the contents. All the good transitions, good organization, and clear sentence structure in the world can't help a report that doesn't have the right information. Information in a report can be "wrong" in several ways: If you can get a sense of how information is inadequate in a report rough draft, you should be well on your way to knowing what specifically to do to revise. One useful brainstorming tool is to think in terms of types of content. Use the following questions to review your rough draft for the types of information to add or change:

Check the structure of your contents

There are two ways of looking at the organization of information in a document: one, covered in the next section, involves looking at the sequence of chunks of information, seeing if they are in the right order. Another has to do with levels of information. You can look at the sentences or paragraphs in a rough draft and see that some sentences go to a deeper level of discussion on the topic than others. Other sentences act like the framework upon which those deeper-level sentences depend. By looking at structure in this way, you not only check its organization but also get a lot of good ideas about how to improve the content of the text.

In the flow of writing, sentences either go to a deeper level of detail or add detail at the same level. For example:

		I have a 1982 Peugeot parked in the driveway.

Lower level	It has 112,000 miles on it.
The second one comments, or goes to a "deeper" level of discussion on the first. Others stay at the same of detail. For example:

		I have a 1982 Peugeot parked in the driveway at home.

Same level	Inside my home, I have a 386-SX computer.
These two are at the same level of detail—they seem to itemizing the stuff I own but not making any further comment on any of it. You can view your writing in these structural terms at any level. Instead of sentences, you can think in terms of paragraphs, whole groups of paragraphs, or even large sections of writing.

How can you use this kind of structural view of your writing? First, it is obviously a good way to check for organization. More powerfully, however, this approach enables you to sense what else you might say about your topic. Once you've got a sense of the structure of the sentences, paragraphs, or sections, you can start asking yourself "should I add more same-level detail here?" or "should I add deeper-level detail here?" You're likely to find spots where you could have said more, making your discussion more complete and explanatory or convincing or whatever purpose it was trying to accomplish.

Check organization

If you have the right information in a report, at least you've got all the "right stuff" available for readers. However, it may still not be adequately organized—like when you've just moved and everything is a mess or still in boxes. You need two essential skills for reviewing the organization of a rough draft:

Figure E-1. Revision by reorganization: it is a more natural progression to start by defining what all solar collectors do, then move on to their different types.

These are just a few possibilities. When the aim is informative, you arrange information so that you ensure that readers understand the basics before moving onto the complicated, technical stuff. When the aim is persuasive, you arrange things to maximize the persuasive effect on the readers, for example, by putting the strongest arguments first.

And in any case, you avoid mixing these approaches—for example, throwing out some data, then stating a few conclusions, and then doing this back and forth in a haphazard way. Keep the apples separate from the oranges!

Figure E-2. Revising to incorporate overviews (topic sentences). In the problem version, it's hard to know where the paragraph is headed. In the revised version, the direction is made clear from the beginning.

Strengthen topic sentences and overviews

One of the best things you can do is go back through a rough draft and check to see if you can insert topic sentences and overviews at key points. When we write, we're not normally sure exactly where a paragraph or section is going in terms of its content and logic. Once it has "gotten there," it is often necessary to go back to the beginning and add some sort of overview or modify what's already there to make the overview clearer. Readers need to know where they are going in a report, what's coming up next, and for that matter where they've just been. Having an overview in a report is like having a map when you're in a new city. Topic sentences and overviews offer a perspective on what's where: the topic, the subtopics, the purpose of the upcoming discussion, its relation to the previous section and to the document as a whole. (Now some of this involves transitions, which is the next element to review for.)

Figure E-2 illustrates this process of going back and fixing up topic sentences and overviews. It shows you before and after versions of a paragraph.

Strengthen transitions

You can have the right information in a report and have it organized properly, but something important can still go wrong. Readers can miss the "flow" of the ideas, have a hard time sensing how the chunks of information are related or connected to each other. What readers need is continuous guidance—which is what you the writer provide. And what you use to provide that guidance is called transitions—various devices that help readers along through a document. There is (or certainly should be) a logic that connects every sentence in a document and that dictates a certain sequence to those sentences.

Your sense of that logic enables you to put the various chunks of information in a report in the proper order. However, readers may have trouble at times seeing that logic. Transitions emphasize that logic. It's not that the connecting point between every pair of information chunks requires some full-blown transition—just the ones that readers are likely to have trouble getting through. Usually, as writers, we almost unconsciously supply the transitional devices that guide readers along. But sometimes we forget, or sometimes a connection that seems obvious to us is hard for readers to see. Then we need to work particularly hard to make the connection apparent.

Once you've identified problem points in your rough draft where better transitions are needed, the next step is to analyze each problem point and find the transition that will improve the connection. To do this, you need to understand something about how transitions operate and what choices you have among them. First, in principle, a transition is a signal that shows how a preceding chunk of information is logically related to a current or upcoming chunk of information. It looks backwards and looks forward at the same time. For example:

     It may be 3 a.m., but I'm not sleepy a bit
In this example, the transitional word "but" sets up a contrast between the topic of the first chunk of information (the lateness of the time) and the second chunk (my lack of sleepiness). The logic is contrastive in this case, but there are other kinds of logic. For example:
     My Peugeot has almost 112,000 miles on it. It still runs great!
In this example, the transitional word is "it," a simple pronoun. Here, the logic is additive, I'm simply adding one related thought onto another. These examples are obviously stupidly simplistic—but when you get into a complex technical topic and the chunks are whole paragraphs of information, transitions really begin to matter.

Figure E-3. Revising problems with transitions. The problem version reads like a series of disconnected statement floating in space. The revised version adds transitional devices to pull the statements together in a "coherent," flowing discussion.

People who have studied the way communication, in particular, writing, works have identified these kinds of basic logic that knit ideas together:

It takes a surprising amount of brain power to construct a transition: you must know the topic of the preceding chunk of information, the topic of the current or upcoming one, the logic that connects them. Then, with that in mind, you must pick out the transitional device that you think will best guide the reader across that juncture between the two chunks of information. Scholars have identified a half-dozen or so kinds of transitional devices (but it seems like there ought to be more...):

Check paragraph length and contents

One last way to review your rough draft at the structure level is to check how you have defined the paragraph breaks. Paragraphs are odd creatures—some scholars of writing believe they don't exist and are just arbitrary break points that writers toss in whenever and wherever they damn well please. Sorry—in technical writing, the paragraph is a key player in the battle for clarity and comprehension. Although not always possible, paragraphs should occur where there is some shift in topic or subtopic or some shift in the way a topic is being discussed.

On a doublespaced full page of writing, look for at least one to two paragraph breaks—there's nothing magical about that average so don't treat it as if it were law. Just take a second look at those long paragraphs, and check for the possibility of paragraph breaks. And, while you're reviewing the paragraphing of your rough draft, take another look at the contents of those paragraphs: are there things that don't belong?


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