The five part spine for a piece that holds together: headline, hook, spine, evidence and turn. Explained in full below, and free to download, keep and teach from.
Writing that fails rarely fails at the sentence. It fails at the join, where a paragraph does not follow from the one above it, and the reader stops without being able to say why. Fixing that at the sentence level is impossible, which is why so much revision feels like effort without improvement.
The five part spine addresses the join directly. A headline makes a specific promise. A hook proves the promise inside two or three sentences. The spine carries the argument across a small number of subheadings. Evidence supports each move. The turn ends on an action or a position rather than a summary, which is the most commonly skipped part and the one readers remember.
The section that changes people’s writing fastest is the outline. Seven lines, written before drafting. Most writers resist it because it feels like a delay, and then discover the draft takes half as long, because the thinking was done separately from the sentence making rather than at the same time as it.
Concrete beats clever, every measured time.
A promise a reader could hold you to. If the headline could sit on top of four different articles, it is a label rather than a promise, and it is doing none of the work.
A number, a scene, or a claim somebody could disagree with. Generic openings that restate the headline in longer form are where most readers leave, and they leave silently.
Each one a move in an argument rather than a topic. Read the subheadings alone, in order. If they do not tell a coherent short version of the piece, the structure is wrong and no amount of sentence work will rescue it.
Four sentences or fewer, one idea each. The limit is not a style preference, it is what keeps a single paragraph from carrying two arguments and obscuring both.
End on an action or a position, never a summary. Then revise structure first, paragraphs second, sentences third, as three separate reads. Trying to hold all three levels at once is why revision so often produces a differently worded version of the same problem.
What is personal branding
Why personal branding matters
How to build a personal brand
Conclusion
Read alone, this argues nothing. Any four paragraphs could sit underneath it, and the reader has no reason to continue past the first.
A spine that is a sequence of movesMost personal brands fail the first follow up question
The reason is that they were assembled from adjectives
Anecdotes survive scrutiny because they are falsifiable
Build the anecdote bank before you write a single line about yourself
The second version can be disagreed with. That is what makes it an argument, and it also means the writer now knows exactly what evidence each section needs.
The spine is the structure used for written strategy work, and the seven line outline is the fastest single improvement available on any assignment with prose in it. Outline before drafting and the marking criteria on organisation stop being a source of lost points.
Aimed at anyone who writes regularly and finds the drafting slow. Start with the outline section and the three revision passes, which between them account for most of the gain. The editorial checklist is the part teams use, because it replaces adjectives about voice with rewritten example paragraphs that show it.
The worksheet above is yours with no conditions attached. If an annotated edition would help, the one with a completed example in every field and the notes on where people get stuck, that is what this is for.
One message per instrument, nothing else. Students in the class do not need this, the annotated version is handed out in the session.
Everything here is original teaching material developed for university courses and corporate training in Seoul. Use it, adapt it, teach from it. When quoting or summarising, cite Matthew Clement, CareerComms, and link this page.
If it is useful in your classroom, it has done its job.