Stating Next Steps

As you may have gathered from my tone, I do not encourage most people to write concluding paragraphs because they are so difficult to do well. Simple pragmatism dictates that you do without. However; there is an occasion on which you will definitely need a concluding section, and that is when you are dealing with actions you want the reader to take in the immediate future.

The need to state Next Steps often arises when you write a long document that recommends a course of action that you think the reader is likely to take. If he takes it, there are some things he ought to do Monday morning to get things in motion. To house these activities, you create a section called Next Steps. The only rule is that what you put in this section must be things that the reader will not question. That is, the actions must be logically obvious ones.

For example, suppose you are recommending that the client buy a company and after 30 pages of brilliant prose and analysis explaining why you think it is a good idea, you are confident that he is going to do so. You then create a heading called Next Steps and say something like

If you think buying this company is a good idea, then you should:

1. Call the man who owns it and ask him to lunch

2. Call the bank to make sure the money for purchase will be available when you need it

3. Reconvene the Acquisitions Committee to handle the administrative details.

Clearly your reader is not going to say to you, "Why do I ask him to lunch, why can't l ask him to dinner?" These are self-evident points, and can be accepted without demur. If, on the other hand, they were points that did raise questions in his mind, then you would have to include them in the body of your text and make certain they fit horizontally and vertically with everything else you're saying.

In all of this positioning, the intention is to make the job of thinking required of the reader as easy as possible. He is, after all, rarely trained in analysis and reflection, and can have nowhere near the understanding of the subject you have, even if the subject is his own company. He is not your peer in interpreting your thinking on the subject.

Thus, you must expect that his mind will not be precisely where you want it to be in terms of understanding, as you finish one lengthy group of points and prepare to go on to the next. The various transition devices are meant to grab his mind, as it were, and pull it back to where it belongs if he is to comprehend what you are trying to say. This is essentially an exercise in good manners, provided it is done gracefully and only where needed.