ClearTips: Riveting reports

9. Tape Your Draft on a Wall to Apply the Finishing Touches

A little-used but wildly effective technique is taping your entire draft report on a wall. That permits many things. One is to see more than a page at a time—indeed, to see all the pages at a time. Only by so doing can you assess overall structure and the balance of your sections and subsections. This also makes it easier to track your various levels of headings, switching sections to subsections and vice versa. And it makes it easier to revise your headings, injecting more punch, ensuring parallel treatment as appropriate.

A second virtue of taping your draft on a wall is that it puts the writer and reviewer side by side, dealing with the problems of a draft, rather than face to face, in the usually uncomfortable confrontation.

A third is that it allows you to make cuts quickly. If you need to cut a 50-page draft to 20 or 30 pages, it's the best technique. I use it for slash-and-burn editing, especially stripping—crossing out most sentences in a succession of paragraphs—lifting the points, and then stringing the points together to form new paragraphs.

Back to Riveting reports • Next