Pyramid Principle: Building a Pyramid

Top Down (preferred)

1. Draw a box. This represents the box at the top of your pyramid. Write down in it the subject you are discussing, if you know it. If not, move on to step two.
2. Decide the Question. Visualize your reader. To whom are you writing, and what question do you want to have answered in his mind about the Subject when you have finished writring? State the Question, if you know it, or go on to step four.
3. Write down the Answer, if you know it, or note you that you can answer it.
4. Identify the Situation. Next you want to prove that you have the clearest statement of the Question and the Answer that you can formulate at this stage. To do that, you take the Subject, move up to the Situation, and make the first noncontroversial statement about it you can make. What is the first thing you can say about it to the reader that you know he will agree is true – either because he knows it, or because it is historically true and easily checked?
5. Develop the Complication. Now you begin you question/answer dialouge with the reader. Imagine that he nods his head in agreement and says “Yes, I know that, so what?” This should lead you to think of what happened in that Situation to raise the reader’s Question. Something went wrong, perhaps, some problem arose, or some logical discrepancy became apparent. WHat happened in the Situation to trigger the Question?
6. Recheck the Question and the Answer. The statement of the Complication should immediately raise the Question you have already written down. If it does not, then change it to the one it does raise. Or perhaps you have the wrong Complication, or the wrong Question, and must think again.

The purpose of the entire exercise is to make sure you know what Question it is you are trying to answer. Once you have the Question, everything else falls into place relatively easily.⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 22-23)

Bottom Up

You can work out the ideas from the bottom up by following a 3-step process.

1. List all the points you think you want to make.
2. Work out the relationships between them.
3. Draw conclusions.⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 26)
   
   

Other Quotes

The answer to any Why? question is always “Reasons,” so you know that the points you need across the Key Line must all be reasons⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 26)

The total introduction includes a statement of the Key Line points. With these included, the reader can get your entire thinking in the first 30 seconds or so of reading. … Indeed, if your entire thinking is not clear to the reader in the first 30 seconds of reading, you should rewrite.⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 29)

To this end, you want to take some care in the way you word the headings, … making sure to state them so they reflect ideas rather than categories. Never have a heading called “Findings,” for example, or “Conclusions.” Such headings have no scanning value.⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 30)

Begin your thinking with the Situation, since you’re more likely to be able to identify the correct Complication and Question following that order.⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 31)

The tendency … is to jump directly down to the Key Line and begin answering the New Question raised by the statement of the main point. Don’t be tempted. In most cases, you will find that you end up structuring email that properly belongs in the Situation or Complication … Sort out the introductory information first, leaving yourself free to concentrate solely on ideas at the lower levels.⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 31)

Always put historical chronology in the introduction. You cannot tell the reader “what happened” in the body of the document, in an effort to let him know the facts. The body can only contain ideas (i.e. statements that raise a question in the reader’s mind because they present him with new thinking) and ideas can relate only to each other logically. This means you can talk about events only if you are spelling out cause-and-effect relationships, since these had to be discovered through analysis.⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 31)

Be careful not to include in the introduction anything that the reader does not know. Including information that he does not know will cause you to distort his Question. And of course, conversely, do not include in the pyramid structure any information that the reader does know. Using information he does know to answer a lower level question implies that you have left important information out of the introduction …⊕ (Minto [1996] 2018, p 33)