What is Structured Writing?

Written by Mark Baker[1] on August 29, 2016

This article is part 1 of 12 in the series Understanding and Mastering
Structured Writing[2]

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chance to highlight some of our most popular and helpful content.
First published in June2015,Mark Bakers introductory article in his
structured writing series answers the question that helps content pros
start on the path to structured writing.
Editors Note: Mark Baker begins his ongoingseries on Structured
Writingby framing a working de nition.Look for futurearticles on
the key concepts of structured writing and their practical application.

I am not a fan of sweeping denitions of big terms. Denitions should

clarify meaning, but attempts to dene terms like content and content
strategy seem only to provoke arguments. The denitions proposed
often seem calculated not so much to clarify meaning as to claim
territory. Still the phrase structured writing seems to demand
something in the way of denition, not because its meanings are obscure,
but because they are so varied. This is a product of diversity of interests,
not lack of denition. My denition is a declaration of my interests; no
more.
Lets start with the broadest possible get-your-arms-around-the-wholething denition:
Structured writing is the act of creating content that obeys one or
more constraints.
What is a constraint? Any rule that shapes, denes, or limits the content.
Examples:
A second level heading can only be used under a rst level heading.
A recipe must list each ingredient and the quantity used.

An API reference must specify a return type for a function.

A list must contain at least one item.
A persons name must include a salutation.
All birds must be identied using their formal names in the Linnaean
taxonomy.
A semicolon is used to join two independent clauses.
Start every sentence with a capital letter.
You probably see the problem here. By this denition, all writing, except
perhaps the scrawls of a two-year old, is structured. And this is, in fact,
the case. All content has structure. Without structure, it would not have
meaning.

So our get-your-arms-around-the-whole-thing denition, while correct,

is not very helpful. We need to constrain it some way.
Lets begin by asking why it is useful to impose constraints on writing.
Constraints make texts useful for a specic purpose. In order to know if a
text is useful to us, we have to know what constraints it follows. When we
do a Google search, for instance, we are expressing a constraint. We are
saying, show me content that is related to this phrase.
This constraint is somewhat imprecise, which is why search results are
not always accurate. Most of the pages that Google searches do not
explicitly say which constraints they meet in a universally agreed
manner, so the search engine has to try to extrapolate what constraints
the page follows and what constraints the readers search string was

meant to express. Given that imprecision on both ends, it is amazing how

well Google works.
Still, the search process would be much easier if content explicitly stated
what constraints it met. This is what the semantic Web initiative[3] is
trying to achieve. This is also where the idea of metadata comes in.
Metadata is a record of the constraints that a particular piece of content
meets. Metadata is not going to solve the global search problem, for
reasons we will explore later, but it does give us a clue about how to
constrain our denition of structured writing.
Structured writing is the act of creating content that obeys one or
more explicitly recorded constraints.

By this denition, unstructured writing does not tell you what its
structure iswhat constraints it obeys. This does not mean it lacks
structure in the wider sense. It simply means that its structure is not
made explicit. For our purposes, structured writing is writing that keeps a
record of the constraints it obeysor at least some of them.
That or at least some of them becomes more importantwhen you
recognize thedifculty in recordingall of the constraints that a text
obeys. There are few circumstances, for instance, under which you are
likely to record that a text obeys the join independent clauses with a
semicolon constraint. Nor would you need to, since this is a universal
constraint that can be easily recognized in context.

Whichraises the question, why record the constraints at all? Why not
just follow them as you write and assume that the reader will recognize
them in context?
Part of the answer lies in that fact that many constraints are not
universal and cannot easily be recognized in context, or that the reader
can read faster and understand better if the constraints are made explicit.
Explicit constraints can take the form of labels and subheads, for
instance. Thus the sections of a recipe may be labeled Ingredients and
Preparation. That you call it a recipe recordsone of the constraints it
follows.
The other part of the answer, though, lies in how we manage content
from creation to presentation. In order to create content, we have to
know what constraints it is supposed to meet. In order to manage the
content, we need to know what constraints it does meet.
Structured writing, then, plays a role in both content creation and
content management. As a term, structured writing is part of a cluster
of terms that includes structured authoring, structured content, and,
more recently, intelligent content. Certain communities prefer one
term over the other. Tool vendors, for instance, almost always use
structured authoring. Many content strategists have recently adopted
intelligent content.
These terms all have the same center, if not always the same edges.
Intelligent Content, in particular, seems to imply a particular
application of structured writing, rather than being simply a synonym
(though if it grows in popularity, the terms implications will inevitably
grow looser). And clearly there is a difference in emphasis between
authoring (a verb), content (a noun), and writing (both verb and
noun). I choose to use structured writing for this series because it
bridges three concerns: the act of composition (writing as an act); the act
of management (writingor contentas an asset to be managed); and
consumption (writing as a product to be consumed).

On the management front, suppose we manage a collection of content

that includes recipes and we want to select all the recipes that are good
matches for a Pinot Noir. We could attempt to do this Google style by
searching for recipe Pinot Noir. Thesearch would probably get us a lot
of correct results, but probably some incorrect ones as well. Some other
types of content might contain the words recipe and Pinot Noir (such
as this essay on the denition of structured writing). Some recipes might
use Pinot Noir as an ingredient rather than a wine match. Some recipes
might be missed because they did not include the word recipe (most
dont).
We could get better results if we could do a query on two explicit elds.
Something like:
RETURN topic WHERE type='recipe' AND wine-match='pinot noir'

But this only works if our stored content contains explicit metadata that
records these particular constraints, type=recipe AND winematch=pinot noir.

Thus,when we created and stored that content, we had to think about

whether we wanted to record that particular metadata. If we did not
think about wanting to be able to select recipes that match particular
wines, we would not have recorded that metadata.
This means that a piece of structured content is structured for a
particular purpose that you thought of at the time you created it. The
content is structured for that purpose or set of purposes you thought of,

but is unstructured for other purposes. Just as a hat can be the right size
for Tom and the wrong size for Harry, a piece of content can be
structured for Mary and unstructured for Jane. It all depends on context.
So lets further constrain our denition:
Structured writing is the act of creating content that obeys one or
more explicitly recorded constraints that serve a de ned purpose.
Keep in mindthat content that has been structured for one purpose may
also turn out to be structured for another purpose. In fact, this frequently
turns out to be the case. On the other hand, it means that you cannot
ever be sure that the structure you apply to your content today will apply
to future purposes that you do not yet understand. In this sense, the idea
that structured writing can future proof your content is misleading. It
can only guarantee future uses you foresee today.
So, in any given context, when someone says, we are going to switch to
structured writing, what they really mean is that we are going to add an
additional bit of structure, an additional set of constraints, that we did
not apply before. Any piece of recorded content has some structure for
some purpose. We are simply talking about adding more structure for
additional specic purposes.
In this respect, saying that we are going to start structured writing is like
saying we are going to start eating healthy or adopt an active lifestyle.
Assuming that your current diet was not pure poison, and that you have
not been completely stationary to this point, you mean that you are
going to eat a diet that is more healthy and live a lifestyle that is more
active than it was before. In the same way, adopting structured writing
really means being more structured than you were before.
Another use of constraints in content management is to guide authors to
make sure that they create content that meets requirements
(requirements is another word for constraints). Rather than authors

deciding ad hoc on the constraints their content will follow and recording
them as they go, it is often useful to establish a set of constraints that
authors must follow while writing and to establish them up front before
the content is written. So:
Structured writing is the act of creating content that obeys one or
more prede ned and explicitly recorded constraints that serve a
de ned purpose.
There is nothing new about this: templates and style guides are examples
of predened constraints that authors are required to obey. However, this
is not a series about how to write a style guide, so I need to constrain the
denition further:
Structured writing is the act of creating content that obeys one or
more prede ned and explicitly recorded constraints that serve a
de ned purpose, in a format readable by machines.
So far, nothing in the denition has specied that the explicitly recorded
constraints have to be machine readable (though the query example
above implies it). There is a lot of content out there that uses a consistent
layout and headings across multiple documents to explicitly record the
fact that they obey a set of constraints for a dened purpose. An API
reference, a tax form, and a tide table are all examples of this type of
content. All these formats are entitled to call themselves structured, but
their structures may only be intended to be read by people, not
machines.

Using a format readable by machines (such as XML) can add several

powerful capabilities to structured writing. Making the structure of a text
machine-readable allows us to enlist the help of machines in making the
content better, and also to hand many management and production tasks
over to machines so that writers can focus more on content.
Of course, any piece of content created on a computer is stored in a
format that is readable by machines. In most cases, however, such
formats only record those constraints as are required by the software
itself for its own purposes. But since those constraints are predened,
explicitly recorded, and serve a dened purpose, any old Word doc
technically still meets my denition. To make structured writing distinct
and worth talking about, we need to constrain the denition once again:
Structured writing is the act of creating content that obeys one or
more prede ned and explicitly recorded constraints that serve a
de ned purpose, in a format readable by machines, with the goal of
making the content better.
There are at least two other ways I could have gone with this nal
constraint. I could have added with the goal of separating the editing
function from the publishing function to realize greater control over
publishing options.
I could have said, with the goal of making content interchangeable
between systems and organizations.

I could have said, with the goal of owning the content storage format so
that I truly own my content and it possibilities.
Those are all legitimate aspirations, and all things that people have done
successfully. But they are not quite as interesting, nor do they have quite
the same potential for good, as the goal of making the content itself
better. They representpublishing and content management aims, and
while those aims can denitely contribute to making content better, they
are only contributions. They are not the whole story of structured writing
and what we can accomplish with it.
This series will explorehow we can use structured writing to make
ourselves better writers and produce better content. That involves the
use of machines as tools to help us write betterjust as many other
professions use machines to make them more procient. But the point is
to be better writers.
That is the best I can do by way of a denition of structured writing,
but I hope it helps dene the scope for you so you know what to expect
from this series. And I hope it interests you enough to keep reading.

Series Navigation
The Three Domains of Content Structure >>[4]

Links

1. http://techwhirl.com/author/markbaker/
2. http://techwhirl.com/series/structured-writing/
3. http://www.w3.org/2013/data/
4. http://techwhirl.com/the-three-domains-of-content-structure/