Where Do You Start the Situation?

You begin writing the Situation by making a statement about the subject with which you know the reader will agree, because you are telling him something that he knows to be, or will accept as, true. If you find you don't want to begin by making a statement about the subject, then either you have the wrong subject, or you're starting in the wrong place to discuss it.

When you can readily identify the reader by name, as in a letter or memorandum, determining where to start is usually fairly straightforward. You start at the point where you can make a self-sufficient and noncontroversial statement about the subject-self-sufficient in the sense that no previous statement is needed to make the precise meaning of this one clear, and noncontroversial in the sense that you can expect the reader automatically to understand it and agree to it.

If you are writing a report for wide circulation, however, or a magazine article or a book, the job is not so much to remind the reader of the question as to plant one. Here getting started is a bit more difficult. But you can assume that your readers are moderately well informed, and present an explanation of what is already generally accepted knowledge on the subject.

My rule of thumb is if the information is of the nature to have appeared in Business Week or Fortune, you can assume that it will be accepted as true by your readership. Once they see material arranged in a narrative form, and often in a way they had not thought about it before, they will be inspired to ask the question you wish to address.

The key characteristic of all opening Situation sentences is that they anchor you in a specific time and place, and thus establish the base for a story to come. Here are some typical opening sentences:

Energoinvest is considering the possibility of exporting alumina front its Mostar plant to Ziar in Czechoslovakia. (Memorandum)

Every major health service is beset by increasing pressure on already scarce resources-and the Irish Health Service is no exception. (Report)

For the first 2.5 million years of the archeological record, the only artifacts left by man were strictly utilitarian: stone tools (Magazine article)

Like other people, managers in today's business world are products of their own culture (Book)

The general response to such statements is for readers to nod their heads and say; "Yes, I'm sure that's true, but so what?" Or to put it more politely, "Why are you telling me this?" This response gives you the opening to insert the Complication.