The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking,3/e

How many times have you written an email at work, read it back and found that it didn't make as much sense as you'd hoped? Or worse, someone else has told you that they can't follow it. The pyramid principle will show you how to communicate your ideas clearly and succinctly. Barbara minto reveals that the mind automatically sorts information into distinctive pyramid groupings. However, if any group of ideas are arranged into a pyramid structure in the first place, not only will it save valuable time and effort to write, it will take even less effort to read and comprehend it. The pyramid principle explains how to: think creatively, reason lucidly, and express ideas with clarity define complex problems and establish the objectives of any document assess your ideas and recognise their relative importance structure your Reasoning into a coherent and transparent argument analyze your argument to confirm its effectiveness. The clear communication of ideas, whether to clients, colleagues or the management Board, is a key factor in determining personal success. Applying the pyramid principle will enable you to present your thinking so clearly that the ideas move off the page and into the reader mind with a minimum of effort and a maximum of effect. Bring your ideas to life!. How many times have you written an email at work, read it back and found that it didn't make as much sense as you'd hoped? Or worse, someone else has told you that they can't follow it. The pyramid principle will show you how to communicate your ideas clearly and succinctly. Barbara minto reveals that the mind automatically sorts information into distinctive pyramid groupings. However, if any group of ideas are arranged into a pyramid structure in the first place, not only will it save valuable time and effort to write, it will take even less effort to read and comprehend it. The pyramid principle explains how to: think creatively, reason lucidly, and express ideas with clarity define complex problems and establish the objectives of any document assess your ideas and recognise their relative importance structure your Reasoning into a coherent and transparent argument analyze your argument to confirm its effectiveness. The clear communication of ideas, whether to clients, colleagues or the management Board, is a key factor in determining personal success. Applying the pyramid principle will enable you to present your thinking so clearly that the ideas move off the page and into the reader mind with a minimum of effort and a maximum of effect. Bring your ideas to life!. Do not expect an easy read and this is not a 'self-help' light read. This is very heavy going and will take time to get your head around the subject matter.This is an important book, and it tries to provide guidelines on logically persuasive and analytical writing. This book is for someone who does not know logical reasoning or critical thinking. The author essentially suggests the structure of an argumentative essay for any work involving written analysis and or persuasion. If the author had approached the book from explaining what is logical reasoning, and then went on to explain the structure, it would have been much more easily understood - rather than expecting people to understand logical reasoning from examples.

Examples are very poorly structured . Very often the author asks you questions without giving you the complete background, and then brings in the background data to answer the question. If the question was posed to you with the complete data before asking the question, you would find the answers quite easy.

The explanation of induction and deduction doesn't help, and if you want to be able to apply the pyramid structure well, you should pick up some other book on logical reasoning and learn from there.

Great idea, good need for a book on the topic, but after the first two chapters, the rest of the book creates more confusion than any learning it may provide - and this difficulty is primarily because of the structure of the examples and also the nature of the examples. The examples are very frustrating - and not at all done well. If only the examples are improved, the learning could be much more.

But yes - definitely everyone must buy the book and read the first two chapters. It really needs to be read in short bursts and is most definitely not easily absorbed. Some of that is the writing style which is a bit d, but the message certainly isn't.