ClearTips: Riveting reports

3. Use Your Supporting Messages to Develop an Outline

There are many ways to break up your topic. For a short piece, look at your main message and see whether the topic lends itself to orderly division. For a long piece, try to discern the relations among the supporting messages to come up with your section headings. Will you move from the general to the particular? Will you divide a problem into its parts? Will you consider different things at different times? Will you group things or separate them? Your section headings should reflect your treatment of the topic.

Subsections are broken up in the same way as sections. If you have two or three sections and the piece is 15 to 20 pages long, you might want as many as four or five subsections in each section. But if you have many sections, you should have only a few subsections, if any, in each.

Your outline and, thus, your architecture will vary with your material, your audience, your constraints. The common structure of the typical academic research paper is background, method, findings, implications, and conclusions, headings that communicate no content. Compare those headings with Rethinking the state—the world over, which is beginning to communicate content. If you must use preordained section headings, try getting creative with your subsection headings, letting your messages drive them rather than the section headings. And if that's not possible, try writing an executive summary with headings driven by your message structure.

These messages:

As the U.S. population rises by 72 million over the next 30 years—to 335 million in 2025—more of us will live in the South and West, be elderly, and have Hispanic and Asian roots.

The South and West will add 59 million residents by 2025-82 percent of the projected growth to 2025—with more than 30 million people in just three states: California, Texas, and Florida.

Also by 2025, the population 65 and older will rise by 28 million people—39 percent of the projected growth—and bring to 27 the number of states where a fifth of their people will be elderly. Only Florida is close today.

The Hispanic and Asian populations will together gain 44 million people and constitute 24 percent of the total population in 2025, up from 14 percent today. California, Texas, and Florida will have 20 million Hispanics.

became the pillars of this outline:

Americans Are Getting Older, Warmer, More Diverse

Opening (no section heading)
1. Different paths to growth
2. 27 Floridas
3. Big gains for Hispanics and Asians

Note how this outline (and eventual table of contents) communicates the essence of the report's content to readers:

Claiming the FutureChoosing Prosperity in the
Middle East and North Africa

1. Disengagement from the changing global economy
   a. Missing out on globalization
   b. Domestic policies are ill suited to new global realities
2. Yesterday's achievements, today's predicament
   a. Achievements of the statist era were considerable
   b. Past successes were the outcome of easier times,
       not statist policies
   c. Why change has been slow
3. The promise of prosperity
   a. Some aspects of the international environment are favorable
   b. Many of the conditions in the Middle East and
       North Africa are favorable
   c. Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia are beginning to reap
       the rewards of reform
4. From politics to economics
   a. Now is the time for action
   b. Choosing to be prosperous
   c. Politics in the service of economics

As does this:

The State in a Changing World

1. Rethinking the state-the world over
   a. The evolving role of the state
   b. Refocusing on the effectiveness of the state
2. Matching role to capability
   a. Securing the economic and social fundamentals
   b. Fostering markets: liberalization, regulation, and industrial policy
3. Reinvigorating institutional capability
   a. Building institutions for a capable public sector
   b. Restraining arbitrary state action and corruption
   c. Bringing the state closer to people
   d. Facilitating international collective action
4. Removing obstacles to change
   a. The challenge of initiating and sustaining reform
   b. The agenda for change

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