Welcome to Chapter 2.

In Chapter 1 you learned how to plan a business letter.

In this chapter, you're going to look at the second stage of the Writing Process:

Plan　to  Organise.

Organise

This course is based on the Writing Process, a step-by-step procedure for producing effective correspondence. Therefore, HSBC recommends that you study each chapter of this course in order, beginning with the introductory chapter "Getting Started".

Objectives

By the end of this chapter you'll be able to organise your writing.

You'll do this by

preparing a clear outline
arranging the contents to fit the outline.
Planning: A Quick Review

In Chapter 1, you learned about the planning stage of the Writing Process.

Before you can organise your writing, it's important that you have planned. Do you remember the three things you need to plan before beginning to write?

Strategies Description
Writer's purpose Why you are writing
Reader's response How you want the reader to respond
Reader's information What you want the reader to know

Organising: Why Do It

A well-organised letter, memo, fax or e-mail is easy to read and understand.

If you organise the contents of your correspondence well, you are more likely to get the results you want.

So, organising is just as important as planning.

In fact, the second stage of the Writing Process is closely related to the first.

In the organising stage, you arrange what you've planned to write. In other words, you make an outline.

Organising: How To Do It

How do you organise what you have planned?

Do you need to use a different outline for every letter, memo, fax and e-mail that you write?

Not at all! For some special situations, you'll need special outlines. You'll look at those in Chapter 7. However, for most of your written correspondence, you can follow a standard outline. You'll learn that outline in this chapter.

But before you learn how to organise the contents of your correspondence, you should look at the various types of correspondence you may have to write.