Structure: Choosing a different viewpoint
Structure. Any document you create needs some sort of basic structure, a basic framework that you use to organize the information. And there are five basic types of structures you can choose:
Location
Alphabet
Time
Category
Hierarchy
(Richard Saul Wurman used that acrostic in his book Information Anxiety 2; I don’t know he borrowed it from someone else.)
In many cases, the material will lend itself to one structure much more than another. For example, a telephone directory seems to naturally fit into an alphabetic structure. A review of baseball players could naturally fit into a hierarchical structure, with the players ranked by some statistical measure. Biographies fit into a time-based structure.
And these structures can be mixed. The baseball player document can be organized by year, with the ranking done within each year.
However, as Wurman points out, you can gain insights by looking at information using different structures, insights not available in the “natural” structure. “Each new vantage point, each mode of organization, will create a new structure. And each new structure will enable you to see a different meaning…”
For example, what would a telephone directory look like organized based on location? When would you want that kind of organization, and who would find that structure more useful than a straightforward alphabetic list? Someone planning a marketing campaign targeted at specific neighborhoods would find such a directory useful. What would it show you if it were organized by location and time, by how long someone had lived at their current address? You’d learn something about the stability—or perhaps the stagnation—of different neighborhoods.
What if an encyclopedia were organized by categories, for example, by realms of knowledge, or perhaps geographically, by continent or country?
Take a moment to consider the basic structure of your documents. Can you perhaps gain some advantages by choosing another viewpoint, another way of organizing the information?
Roy Jacobsen
in Growing as a writer
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