Friday, September 7, 2007

Practice Makes Perfect

In order to design effective documents you must:

  • Know what you have to say.

  • Know how often you will have to say it.

  • Know what additional things you might want to say.

  • Find a way to repeat your message clearly and effectively while making minor adjustments that can customize the basic message for each and every occasion.

While there is always room for some slight variation on a theme, the basic message must move forward in a clear-cut, consistent fashion.
  • This is how a basic marketing campaign is designed to reach numerous target audiences.

  • This is how speeches are written for political candidates who must hit the road and go stumping for votes.

  • This is how you to learn to organize your thoughts.

When you dictate reports for a hospital, you will probablyhave to remember certain formats for histories and physicals, consultations, operative reports, transfer summaries, and discharge summaries. Each report is constructed by organizing a collection of intelligent "building blocks." Once each building block has been placed into its proper alignment, the assembly of any document becomes much, much easier.

This technique allows you to quickly and efficiently generate any type of document by knowing how to analyze the data that must be covered, assemble it in a logical format, and transmit that information in a coherent manner from the beginning to the end of the document.


Organizing your thoughts is an acquired skill that involves a learned pattern of behavior. It is also a skill that you can keep fine-tuning for the rest of your career.




Next: Learning To Work With Intelligent Building Blocks

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