HBR Guide to Better Business Writing (HBR Guide Series)

Chapter 3

Divide the writing process into four separate tasks

Do you feel anxious every time you sit down to write? Your main difficulty is probably figuring out how to begin. Don’t try to picture the completed piece before you’ve gathered and organized your material. It’s much too soon to think about the final, polished product—and you will just make the challenge ahead of you seem overwhelming. The worry can take more out of you than the actual writing.

Instead, break up your work. Think of writing not as one huge task but as a series of smaller tasks. The poet, writer, and teacher Betty Sue Flowers has envisioned them as belonging to different characters in your brain: MACJ.¹ That stands for Madman-Architect-Carpenter-Judge, representing the ...