The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto PDF Download
The pyramid principle is a writing guide by Barbara Minto, stating the correct way of structuring your document and creating a masterpiece with the ideas and information you have. Let’s have a look at the key takeaways from this publication to get a quick summary! You can download the pyramid principle pdf on this page.
| Book title | The Pyramid Principle |
| Author | Barbara Minto |
| No. Of pages | 175 Pages |
| PDF Size | 73.66 MB |
| Language | English |
| Category | Education, Writing |
Book Summary
To structure a document perfectly, organize your ideas and thoughts in a special pyramid order. For instance, you should think of the main idea that you will support throughout the content. After finalizing that main idea, organize other ideas in a way that they should support the main idea and still seem interconnected.
In this way, the document will look organized and the information will be more comprehensive for the reader to absorb and understand. To check whether you have structured the document properly or not, you can check if all of your supporting ideas connect, in the pyramid order. If so, then go with it and if not, modify the structure by re-organizing the ideas.
Order
The order of ideas determines whether your final writing piece will be clear or unclear. As stated before, to make a comprehensive layout, you need to craft a special order in which all the minor, supporting ideas should defend or explain the major idea.
If you can’t accomplish this goal of ordering ideas and attaining enough clarity, it means you didn’t understand and process all the ideas and now can’t decide which idea you should put first. If that’s the case, go through the entire data all over again and try to process it. Once done, identify the major idea and minor, supporting ideas and then connect them.
Groups
To make the ideas look more organized, assemble them into different groups. For example, make a separate group for reasonings and another group for recommendations. After making the groups, sort all the relevant information in the corresponding group and then connect these groups.
For example, if the very first idea is about a specific problem in a firm, all the other ideas in the group should also be about the problems in the firm. After discussing this group of problems, you may move towards the solution group, and from there, you may head to the reasoning group, and so on.
Headings
To prepare your reader for the kind of information that’s coming up, make headings. These headings will act as highlights of your whole content. However, make sure that the headings should be brief and small – Never use those one-sentence-sort-of headings.
Similarly, your headings should only be the bold point to remind – instead of being a part of the content. Since many people don’t read the headings carefully, if you regard your headings as a part of the content, it might confuse the reader. And most importantly, don’t try to prove the connection between current and previous headings in the very first sentence. Instead, the very first lime should have the new but corresponding information. This will give an impression of starting a new topic, instead of repetition and fluff.
