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Start with your main idea, then build up the evidence to back it or elaborate it.
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Start with your main idea, then build up the evidence to back it or elaborate it.
Barbara Minto1 was a management consultant, who got tired of hearing the advice ‘make it clearer’ and set out to explain how.
Her principle is to give readers the conclusion first, then back it with evidence, rather than the other way around. This means the reader knows where they’re headed, and can see everything they read as relevant to the conclusion. So the conclusion sits at the top of the pyramid, underpinned by the detail underneath. This could be used with a layered design pattern.
Minto’s work was inspired by contemporary research on chunking and ancient principles of rhetoric.
Journalists have traditionally used this approach too. In his how-to book for journalists, Leslie Sellers recommended you write the headline before you write the story. That way, he said,
The selling point is found first, and things proceed from there... with a headline in mind the story falls into place all that more easily.2
He was talking getting people to buy newspapers, but it applies equally to anything we write and design.
1. Barbara Minto (2009) The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking, Financial Times/ Prentice Hall, 3rd edition.
2. Leslie Sellers L (1968) The simple subs book, Oxford: Pergamon Press