Exercises — Chapter 4: Structure

Writing is learned by writing. Most of these ask you to reorganize or produce text, not just pick an answer. Where a task is open-ended, a self-assessment rubric follows it. Fuller solutions to starred items live in appendices/answers-to-selected.md.

Difficulty: ⭐ warm-up · ⭐⭐ revision · ⭐⭐⭐ production/synthesis · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ extension.

Part A — Analyze This ⭐

Identify what's structurally working or broken. Name the principle; don't fix it yet.

A1. A report opens: "This document is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews background. Section 3 describes our approach. Section 4 presents results. Section 5 concludes." Is this forecasting statement doing useful work for the reader? What's the weakness, and how does it differ from a good forecast?

A2. Read these four headers from a memo: ## Overview / ## Analysis / ## Considerations / ## Conclusion. A reader is hunting for the cost estimate. Can they find it from the headers? Name the failure.

A3. Here are the first sentences of five consecutive paragraphs, read in order: "Latency rose sharply in Q3." / "The on-call team was paged eleven times." / "Our first hypothesis was the database." / "The fix reduced p95 by 87%." / "We recommend making the patch permanent." Do these topic sentences form a usable map? What does that tell you about the paragraphs?

A4. A status update reads: "Things are mostly fine. The frontend is done. We had some issues with the API but they're sorted now mostly. Data is a bit behind. Overall okay." Identify three distinct structural problems (think: prominence, parallelism, scannability).

A5. Below is the opening of a bug report. Identify whether it leads bottom-up or top-down, and whether that's the right choice for this genre.

"While testing the checkout flow on Tuesday, I noticed the page seemed slow. I cleared my cache and tried again. It was still slow. I checked on a colleague's machine and saw the same thing. Eventually I realized the discount API returns a 500 for any cart over $1,000, which blocks checkout entirely for large orders."

A6. A procedure is written as connected prose: "Begin by installing the dependencies, after which you'll want to configure the environment file, and then once that's done you can run the migration before finally starting the server." Is prose the right tool here? Why or why not?

A7. ⭐⭐ A research paper has an excellent abstract that states the finding in the first sentence, followed by a body organized as Opening → Challenge → Action → Resolution. A reviewer complains: "Your abstract gives away the result, but your introduction makes me wait for it—that's inconsistent." Is the reviewer right? Explain using the idea of layered structure.

A8. ⭐⭐ Find the structural reason this paragraph is hard to scan, even though every sentence is clear:

"The vendor's pricing is competitive. Their support team responded to our test ticket in four hours. We were impressed. The contract requires a two-year commitment, which is longer than we'd prefer. Query performance in our trial was the fastest of the three. The data residency options meet our compliance needs. Onboarding would take an estimated three weeks." (Hint: what's the reader supposed to do with this, and does the structure help them?)

Part B — Revise This ⭐⭐

Rewrite for structure. Give the reorganized version.

B1. Flip it top-down. Rewrite this so the conclusion leads.

"We tested the new caching layer over two weeks under production-like load, measuring hit rate, memory use, and tail latency across three traffic patterns. After analyzing the results and comparing against our current setup, we found that the new layer improves p99 latency by 40% with no increase in error rate, and we recommend rolling it out."

B2. Write the missing summary. The following is a competent but summary-less incident report body. Write a 2–4 sentence executive summary (inverted pyramid, stands alone) to place on top of it.

"At 14:02 UTC, the payment service began returning errors. The on-call engineer was paged at 14:05 and identified that a database connection pool had been exhausted by a deploy that lowered the pool size. The pool size was reverted at 14:24 and the service recovered fully by 14:27. Approximately 1,400 transactions failed during the window and have since been retried successfully. A guardrail was added to block deploys that reduce the pool below the minimum."

B3. De-bulletize the argument. Convert this bullet list back into connected prose that makes the case.

Reasons to adopt the new framework: - Smaller bundle size - Better TypeScript support - But: team has no experience with it - Migration would take ~6 weeks - Long-term maintenance is easier

B4. Bulletize the prose. The opposite move. This paragraph crams discrete, parallel items into prose; convert the appropriate parts to a list.

"To submit a complete bug report, include the steps to reproduce the issue, the expected behavior, the actual behavior you observed, your environment details such as OS and browser version, and any relevant logs or screenshots, and please also note the severity."

B5. Fix the headers. Replace these generic headers with informative ones, inventing plausible content consistent with the labels. The document is a recommendation memo about migrating a database.

## Introduction / ## Background / ## Discussion / ## Recommendation / ## Appendix

B6. Fix the hierarchy. This heading outline is structurally broken. Rewrite the levels so the tree is coherent (no skipped levels, consistent nesting).

# Q3 Reliability Review ### Executive Summary ## Incidents #### Database Outage #### API Latency ## Recommendations ### Short Term ##### Long Term

B7. ⭐⭐⭐ Reorganize for parallel structure. This section of a vendor comparison covers three vendors in three different orders with three different categories. Rewrite it so all three are parallel (same subheaders, same order), inventing nothing new—just reorganize and align what's there.

"Vendor A is the cheapest at $30k/year, though its support is community-only. **Vendor B** offers 24/7 support and the best query speed in our tests, at $48k/year. For Vendor C, the main draw is its compliance certifications; pricing is $42k/year and performance was middling."

B8. ⭐⭐ Add the signposts. This section opening drops the reader into the middle with no map. Add a one-sentence forecasting statement at the front and make sure each following idea has a topic sentence that leads with its point.

"The database uses connection pooling. There were three incidents last quarter. The first was a pool exhaustion event during a deploy. Monitoring was insufficient to catch it early. The team has since added alerts. Capacity was also increased. A runbook now exists for the on-call engineer."

B9. ⭐⭐⭐ Unbury two ledes. This paragraph contains two important conclusions, both buried in the middle, surrounded by process narrative. Find both conclusions, then rewrite the paragraph top-down so they lead.

"After the team spent six weeks instrumenting the service and collecting traces across a representative sample of requests, and after several rounds of analysis comparing peak and off-peak behavior, it became apparent that the autoscaler was reacting too slowly to traffic spikes, which is the primary cause of the timeouts users have reported; separately, the analysis also surfaced that 12% of our compute spend is being wasted on over-provisioned off-peak capacity, which we had not previously measured. Further investigation into the autoscaler's cooldown settings is ongoing."

Part C — Write This ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

Produce the document. Apply the chapter's principles deliberately.

C1. ⭐⭐ The BLUF email. Your team finished a security patch that needs to be deployed to production tonight; you need your manager's approval by 3 p.m. Write the email (subject line + body, under 120 words) using BLUF: request and deadline first, justification second. The reader is busy and trusts your technical judgment.

C2. ⭐⭐ The inverted-pyramid status report. You lead three workstreams: Search (on track, shipping Friday), Billing (at risk, blocked on a vendor, revised date next Wednesday), Mobile (on track, in QA). Write a status update that a scanning VP can absorb in fifteen seconds, with the at-risk item impossible to miss. Use parallel structure across the three.

C3. ⭐⭐⭐ The layered long document (outline only). You're writing a postmortem for a four-hour outage. Produce: (a) a 3-sentence summary for the top (inverted pyramid), and (b) a header outline of the body organized as OCAR (Opening, Challenge, Action, Resolution), with an informative header for each of the four parts plus any subheaders you'd use. You don't need to write the body prose—just the summary and the structural skeleton.

C4. ⭐⭐⭐ Informative headers from scratch. Take any document you've written for school or work in the last year. Write only a new set of headers for it—informative ones that state content. Then check: does reading your headers alone convey the document's gist (the inverted-pyramid-of-headers test)? Note what you had to change.

Part D — Synthesis and Critical Thinking ⭐⭐⭐

Integrate across chapters; argue, don't just answer.

D1. Translate-for-audience, structurally. Take this one finding and write the first sentence only of a document conveying it, three times—for (a) a fellow engineer, (b) an engineering manager, (c) a non-technical executive. The finding: a memory leak in the image-processing service forces a restart every six hours, costing roughly $4,000/month in extra compute and occasional 30-second outages. Then explain in two sentences how audience (Ch 2) determined which fact you put first each time.

D2. The "so what?" test, scaled up. Chapter 3 taught the sentence-level "so what?" test. State the document-level version of that test (the question you ask of each whole section), and apply it: invent a plausible report section that passes the sentence test (clear prose) but fails the section test (the reader wouldn't miss it). Explain.

D3. Find the flaw. A colleague argues: "Conclusion-first is manipulative—you're telling people what to think before showing the evidence. Real rigor means walking the reader through the analysis and letting them reach the conclusion." Write a two-paragraph response. Where is the colleague partly right, and where is the argument wrong? (Use the Challenger case and the idea of layered structure.)

D4. ⭐⭐⭐ Diagnose with a reverse outline. Find a real document you wrote (or use a published article). Produce its reverse outline (one line per paragraph's point). Then write a short diagnosis: Is the conclusion buried? Do the points flow? Are any paragraphs pointless or overloaded? What two structural edits would most improve it?

Part M — Mixed Practice (Interleaved) ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

These mix this chapter with earlier ones. Decide which principle is actually being tested before you act.

M1. A passage is both bloated (Ch 3) and badly structured (Ch 4): the conclusion is buried under nominalizations. Diagnose both problems separately, then rewrite. "The undertaking of a comprehensive evaluation of the three candidate vendors was performed by the team, and subsequent to the completion of said evaluation across a multiplicity of relevant criteria, a determination was reached that the option designated Vendor B represents the most advantageous selection." (Which problem do you fix first—the bloat or the structure—and why?)

M2. You're asked to "make this report shorter." On inspection, the prose is already tight (no bloat to cut), but the report is 30% longer than it needs to be because of structure. Explain how a structural problem can make a document too long even when the sentences are concise, and name two structural fixes that shorten without cutting content.

M3. A document has a perfect inverted-pyramid summary but the audience is wrong—it leads with the engineering root cause, but the reader is a customer-success manager who needs to know customer impact. Which chapter's principle is the real failure here, Ch 2 or Ch 4? Defend your answer. (Careful—this is a trap; think about how they interact.)

M4. Choose the right structure for each, and name the framework: (a) a one-page request for budget approval; (b) a postmortem of a production incident; (c) installation instructions for a CLI tool; (d) a paragraph explaining why you chose REST over GraphQL. For each, state: list or prose? conclusion-first or narrative arc? which named framework (BLUF / inverted pyramid / OCAR / SCQA / problem–solution)?

M5. ⭐⭐⭐ Take the "before" churn analysis logic from Chapter 2's Dana Whitfield example (a data scientist writes a memo to a VP of Marketing). Sketch the structural difference between the methodology-first version and the recommendation-first version: what's the first sentence of each, and which one survives the "VP has 30 seconds" test? Connect this explicitly to the inverted pyramid.

Part E — Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (optional; Deep Dive track)

E1. Reverse-engineer a master. Find a piece of technical writing you think is excellently structured (a well-known engineering blog post, a canonical RFC, a famous postmortem). Reverse-outline it. What structural framework is it using? How does it serve scanners and deep readers simultaneously? Write a one-page analysis you could teach from.

E2. The structure of a thing you'll write a lot. Pick a document type you produce repeatedly (PR descriptions, weekly status emails, design docs, lab reports). Design a reusable parallel skeleton for it—a fixed set of sections/headers in a fixed order—justified by how its readers actually use it (who scans, who reads deep, what they need first). This is the seed of a personal template; you'll formalize templates in later chapters.

Self-Assessment Rubric (for open-ended items C, D, E)

Rate each dimension 1 (weak) – 4 (strong):

Total ≥ 24/28: structurally sound. 17–23: revise the lowest two dimensions. < 17: re-read §4.2–§4.5 and redo with the reverse outline first.

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