Business Writing Tips from The Writing Center

What is a Zero Draft?

Effective writers organize their thoughts before they organize their documents. A Zero Draft is a method that allows you to quickly capture your ideas. Capturing key ideas before you write helps ensure a complete and well-organized document. The flexibility of a Zero Draft lets you work with your ideas on the most basic level, allowing you to "brainstorm" for complete content and "try out" different organizational patterns.

A Zero Draft:

1. Encourages brevity and clarity.
2. Frees you to generate ideas first--before focusing on formal outlines or writing perfect sentences.
3. Helps ensure complete content.
4. Captures ideas quickly in case you are interrupted.

Capturing ideas in a Zero Draft

To create a Zero Draft, use scratch paper, Post-it Note pads, a blackboard or flip chart pad - anything that signals "rough copy."

Write your topic in the center of your paper. Then, as ideas occur to you, position them around your topic like planets around a sun, clustering related ideas. When you're finished writing down ideas, cross out any that you don't intend to use.

The following Zero Draft captures ideas about the benefits of using a Zero Draft:

For longer documents with more complicated information, put each main idea on a separate piece of paper to allow greater flexibility. Look over the ideas you've written down, and eliminate any that are unnecessary. Then, as shown below, you can group similar ideas, rank the ideas within each group, and finally rank the groups.

This series of tips has been adapted from our Effective Business Writing course. Previous editions may be read at http://www.uliveandlearn.com/newsletters/index.cfm.

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