ORDERING FROM THE TOP DOWN

Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to clear writing. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized. I cannot emphasize this point too much.

Remember that the reader (or listener) can only take the sentences in one at a time. You know he will assume that those ideas that appear together logically belong together. If you do not tell him in advance what the relationship is, but simply give the ideas one at a time, he will automatically look for similarities by which he can group the points being expressed, so that he can explain to himself the significance of the groupings.

Alas, people being as diverse in background and understanding as they are, they rarely put exactly the same interpretation on your groupings as you do. Indeed, they not infrequently find that they can't see any relationship at all between the ideas in a set. Even if they think exactly as you do, you are making their reading more difficult, since they must supply what is unstated.

Let me demonstrate how confusing any order other than top down is with an example. Suppose I join you to have a beer in the pub and, apropos of nothing in particular, say:

I was in Zurich last week ― you know what a conservative city Zurich is ― and we went out to lunch at an outdoor restaurant. Do you know that within 15 minutes I must have seen 15 people with either a beard or a moustache.

Now, I have given you a piece of information, and without realizing it you will automatically make some assumptions about the reason for my giving you that information. In other words, you will see this statement as part of a group of ideas not yet expressed, and prepare your mind to receive the rest by assuming a probable purpose behind the statement. This expectancy reduces the strain of analyzing each succeeding idea for all its attributes; you look only for the one in common with what has gone before.

Thus, you might think such things as, "She's talking about how unconservative Zurich is getting, “or" She's going to compare Zurich with other cities," or even, "She's hung up on beards and moustaches." Regardless of what reaction you have, the point is that your mind is waiting for further information on one of those same subjects, whatever it turns out to be. Seeing that blank look on your face, I then go on to say:

And you know, if you walk around any New York office you can rarely find even one person who doesn't have sideburns or a moustache.

Now what am I getting at? I seem to be comparing not cities as such, but office workers in cities; and instead of just beards and moustaches I seem to be including all manner of facial hair. "Probably;" you're thinking, "she disapproves of the hairy style. Or maybe she's going to compare the styles in various offices. Or maybe she's surprised at the amount tolerated in professional firms." In any case, you mutter something noncommittal in reply, and thus encouraged I go on to state:

And of course facial hair has been a part of the London scene for years.

"Ah," you think, "at last I see what she's getting at. She's trying to make the point that London is ahead of all the other cities," and you tell me so. Perfectly logical, but it's wrong; that's not what I was getting at all. In fact, what I was getting at was this:

You know, it's incredible to me the degree to which facial hair has become such an accepted part of business life.

In Zurich. . .

ln New York. . .

And of course in London . . .

See how much more easily you can comprehend the group of ideas in the way I mean you to once the framework within which to judge the relationship between them has been given to you? The reader is always going to look for a structure connecting the ideas as they come to him. To make sure he finds the one you intended, you must tell him in advance what it is-to make sure he knows what to look for. Otherwise he is likely either to see an unintended relationship, or worse, none at all, in which case you have both wasted your time.

As an example of this latter situation, look at the main points of the opening paragraphs of an article on equal pay for women:

Granted equal pay, women could finish off worse than before-i.e., there could be a wider rather than narrower gap between average earnings of women and men than today.

Equal pay means either equal pay for the same job or equal pay for equal value of work (to the employer).

Applying either interpretation means either

Compelling employers to act in their own self-interest, or Ending restrictive practices by male workers.

Here you are given five ideas between which the connecting relationship is unclear, despite the fact that the author has "started at the top," as he sees it. Can you not feel your mind scrabbling about trying to find a relationship, coming to the conclusion that there is none, and giving up in disgust? The mental strain is simply too great.

Alas, a reader, no matter how intelligent, has only a limited amount of mental energy available. Some of it will be used up just recognizing and interpreting the words he reads, a further amount seeing the relationships between the ideas, and whatever is left comprehending their significance.

You can economize his need to spend time on the first two activities by presenting the ideas so that they can be comprehended with the least possible mental effort. To sequence them instead so that the mind has to go backward and forward to make connections is simply bad manners, and most readers react by refusing to do so.

To summarize, a reader groups and summarizes ideas as a matter of course in order to remember them. He comprehends ideas presented to him more readily if they are also grouped and summarized, and presented from the top down. All of this suggests that the clearest written documents will be those that consistently present their information from the top down, in a pyramidal structure, even though the original thinking will have been done from the bottom up.