Structured Business Writing Work Sample for Consultants, Managers and Technical LeadsWhere the answer sits decides what it costs. A buried answer is priced as the whole document; a stray paragraph as a paragraph.
Forty exercises for anybody whose recommendations are read by somebody busier than they are. Each one puts a real document in front of you, an email, a memo, a board paper, a slide, and asks for one structural choice at one position in it: the subject line, the first sentence, the opening paragraph, the second-level grouping, a supporting paragraph, an exhibit title, or the close. Nothing tests grammar, spelling, vocabulary, fluency, typing or tone. The report prices each defect by where in the document it sits, on a decay curve printed above the score with the reason for each step, and shows every choice you made beside the sentence a busy reader would actually take from it. About 25 minutes. Rs 999 in India inclusive of GST; US$9.99 elsewhere.
The first writing assessment that prices a defect by how early the reader meets it
The Structured Business Writing Work Sample is a twenty-five-minute applied skill assessment for consultants, managers and technical leads. It measures whether you put the answer where a busy reader will find it, keep the opening's chain intact, group the support without overlap or gap, make headings carry a message, and close with one ask.
Every writing course teaches the shape: the answer at the top, the reasons grouped beneath it, a situation and a complication before the question, headings that say something. Most people leave knowing it. What no course and no writing test measures is where, in a real document, the shape fails, and what each failure costs. A subject line that names a topic costs every reader who never opens the email. A supporting paragraph in the wrong section costs the reader one paragraph. Those are not the same defect, and an assessment that counts them the same is counting, not measuring.
This one prices them differently, on purpose, and says so. Each of the forty exercises sits at one of seven positions in the order a reader meets a document, and each position carries a declared weight: 8 for the subject line, 7 for the first sentence, 6 for the opening paragraph, 4 for the grouping, 3 for a supporting paragraph, 2 for an exhibit title and 2 for the close. The curve is a value judgement, not a measurement, and the report prints it above the score with the reason for each step so that you can disagree with it. No position is allowed to carry more than about 35 per cent of the maximum loss, each position's share is printed as a number, and the score is normalised against the document, never against your own defect count, so a reader who answered two exercises cannot outscore one who answered twenty.
The constructs are public and cited as such: the pyramid of a message above its grouped support and the situation-complication-question-answer opening; the reading research on the topic position and the stress position, on old information before new, on the mental outline a reader builds from a text under a working-memory limit, on why a buried answer costs a re-read, on primacy and recency, and on the finding that workplace readers read in order to act. No branded method and no firm's name is used anywhere on the form or the report.
Twelve of the forty exercises ask for a single structural choice at a named position, with every option something a capable writer would defend and the keyed one printed with its reason. Eight ask you to put sentences or sections in the order a reader needs. Seven ask which lines belong in a group and which do not, scored so that ticking everything and ticking nothing both lose. Five ask for a count: by which word the answer should land, how many asks a close should carry, how many headings a reader can hold. Four match a heading or exhibit title to the message it must carry, and four put you in front of a draft with an hour to go.
The report is built as a two-column translation. Every choice you made is rendered twice from the same row: what you wrote, in the words of the exercise, beside the sentence a busy reader would come away with. Both columns are addressed to you, and there is no third-party column on the page. The rows are pinned to the position where each exercise sits, so the page reads in the order a reader meets a document, and a position with no defect on it is drawn empty rather than left out, because the shape of the document is the finding.
Beneath the columns: the structure index, chance-corrected against the way writers ordinarily answer (they bury the answer far more often than they front it) with its 68 and 95 per cent bands drawn and written; the five parts each against the ordinary respondent with no total; the strength paired with what it costs; one boxed if-then drawn from the position that cost you most; the movement a re-sitting in four weeks would have to clear to count as real change; the reliability table with every refusal printed; and the plain list of what the report does not say. Rs 999 in India inclusive of GST, or US$9.99 elsewhere.
What you walk away with
Seven positions in the order a reader meets a document, each with its declared weight, its share of the maximum loss printed as a number, and the reason for the step. A value judgement, printed so it can be argued with, with the 35 per cent cap on any one position checked on every sitting.
What you wrote, in the words of the exercise, beside the sentence a busy reader would actually come away with. Both from the same row, both addressed to you, pinned to the position where the exercise sits, ordered by position in the document rather than by part.
Your weighted loss against the ordinary respondent's on the same positions, scaled so that zero is the ordinary writer, 100 is no defect anywhere and a negative figure is worse than ordinary, with the 68 per cent band as a solid block and the 95 per cent band as an outlined box, and its seven contributors beneath it.
Answer first, the chain intact, grouping the support, headings that carry a message, and the close and the ask, each drawn against the ordinary respondent with its own band and placement. A part too thin for a figure carries a placement word instead, with the reason printed where the figure would have gone.
One boxed if-then sentence naming a specific situation and a specific replacement behaviour, drawn from the position that cost you most. Beside it, the movement a re-sitting after four weeks would have to exceed to count as real change rather than measurement error.
The declared shares behind the ordinary respondent, printed with their range and spread: writers bury the answer, name the topic and repeat the body far more often than they front, state and ask, so a uniform coin is never the null. Observed data replaces the declared shares once live sittings exist, and the page says so.
Inside your report
Illustrative sample — your report is generated from your own responses.
This decay curve is a value judgement, not a measurement: it was not derived from anybody’s answers, and it is printed with the reason for each step so that you can disagree with it.
| Position | Weight | Items | Share | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subject line | 8 | 4 | 18% | Everybody reads it; a defect costs the whole document. |
| First sentence | 7 | 5 | 20% | The reader decides here whether to go on. |
| Opening | 6 | 7 | 24% | Where the chain is set; a broken chain costs a re-read. |
| Grouping | 4 | 8 | 18% | The map of the argument; a slip costs a section. |
| Support | 3 | 4 | 7% | A stray paragraph costs a paragraph. |
| Exhibit | 2 | 4 | 5% | A topic title costs the time to find the point. |
| Close | 2 | 8 | 9% | The reader already has the answer; a weak close costs the next action. |
About two chances in three that a re-sitting today would put your structure index between 24 and 38; nineteen in twenty between 17 and 45. Weighted loss 31.9 of a possible 177, against 88 for the ordinary respondent on the same positions.
| Position | Your loss | Maximum |
|---|---|---|
| Subject line | 10.4 | 32 |
| First sentence | 7 | 35 |
| Opening | 9 | 42 |
| Grouping | 3 | 32 |
| Support | 0 | 12 |
| Exhibit | 1 | 8 |
| Close | 1.5 | 16 |
How to read it: the curve comes first because it decides the score, and it is a choice, not a finding. The maximum loss is the sum of the weights of the positions you answered, never your own defect count, so answering less cannot score more.
Both columns come from the same row and both are addressed to you; there is no third-party column on the page. Rows run in the order a reader meets a document. ■ defect · ◐ part defect · ● no defect · ○ not answered. A position with no defect is drawn empty, never left out.
- Subject line · weight 8 · exercise 1 · Structural choice · Answer firstPART DEFECT · 0.33 × 8 = 2.7What you wrote
You chose: "Decision needed on suppliers before Friday"
What a busy reader takes from it“Something about suppliers needs deciding; I do not know what.”
- Opening · weight 6 · exercise 9 · Structural choice · The chain intactDEFECT · 1.00 × 6 = 6.0What you wrote
You chose: "The portal was built by the payments team over four months last year"
What a busy reader takes from it“More history; I still do not know what the problem is.”
- Grouping · weight 4 · exercise 14 · Select every line · Grouping the supportPART DEFECT · 0.17 × 4 = 0.7What you wrote
You put in the group: "The courier delivers to all 28 states we ship to"; "Same-day delivery covers the six largest metros"; "Rural pin codes are served three days a week"; "Damage claims are settled within ten working days" — including 1 that did not belong.
What a busy reader takes from it“One line in coverage is really about something else; the groups overlap and I distrust the count.”
- Close · weight 2 · exercise 17 · Structural choice · The close and the askNO DEFECTWhat you wrote
You chose: "Confirm closure by 15 March so the lease notice goes out"
What a busy reader takes from it“Decide by 15 March or the lease rolls over.”
- Support · weight 3 · NO DEFECT HERE
No defect in the support: every paragraph you placed sat under the heading that owns it. Drawn empty rather than left out, because the shape of the document is the finding.
| # | Position | Weight | Defect | Loss | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Subject line | 8 | 0.33 | 2.7 | PART DEFECT |
| 9 | Opening | 6 | 1.00 | 6.0 | DEFECT |
| 14 | Grouping | 4 | 0.17 | 0.7 | PART DEFECT |
| 17 | Close | 2 | 0.00 | 0 | NO DEFECT |
How to read it:the left column is your structural choice in the words of the exercise; the right is the sentence a busy reader would come away with, authored for that choice. The loss beside each row is the defect times the position’s weight, which is why the same mistake costs more in the subject line than in the close.
Built for
- Consultants and analysts whose recommendation memos and board papers are read by people with four minutes
- Managers writing upward: project updates, decision memos and requests to a director who reads on her phone
- Technical leads and engineers writing to people who do not share their vocabulary and will not read past the first screen
- Learning and development partners who need one specific structural change per person, with the evidence beside it, rather than another course on the pyramid
Find out where in your document the structure fails, and what it costs
40 exercises across six formats · about 25 minutes · a decay curve printed before the score, a structure index with both bands, two columns for every choice, five parts, one boxed change. Rs 999 in India inclusive of GST, or US$9.99 elsewhere. Sit it again in four weeks.
₹999 (incl. GST) · assessment and full report, nothing further to pay
Frequently asked questions
No. Nothing on the form tests grammar, spelling, vocabulary, fluency, typing or tone, and no exercise asks you to write prose. Every exercise puts a document in front of you and asks for one structural choice: which subject line, which first sentence, which order, which lines belong in a group, which heading carries the message, which close. It measures where in a document the structure fails and prices the defect by how early a reader meets it. The report's refusal block says so in plain words, and adds that a document can be structurally perfect and wrong.
The executive-summary assessment measures compression: what survives a word budget and what goes above the fold. The email-tone assessment measures received tone, how a named reader takes the words. This one measures structure and nothing else: where the answer sits, whether the opening's chain holds, whether the groups are exclusive and complete, whether headings carry a message, and whether the close carries one ask. A perfectly compressed summary can still bury its answer in the third sentence, and a perfectly toned email can still name its topic in the subject line. The report names the difference on the page.
Because they cost the reader different amounts. A subject line is read by everybody, including the people who open nothing, so a defect there costs the whole document for every reader who stops at the list view. A supporting paragraph in the wrong section costs the reader that paragraph, and the map above it still holds. The seven positions carry declared weights of 8, 7, 6, 4, 3, 2 and 2 in the order a reader meets them. That curve is a value judgement of this instrument, not a measurement, and the report prints it above the score with the reason for each step so you can disagree with it. No position is allowed to carry more than about 35 per cent of the maximum loss, and each position's share is printed as a number.
Zero is the ordinary respondent: a writer who picks each option at its declared share, places each sentence where people usually place it, and ticks each line at its declared rate. Those shares are authored the way writers actually behave, burying the answer and naming the topic far more often than fronting and stating, so a uniform coin is never the null; observed data replaces them once live sittings exist. The score is normalised against the document, the sum of the weights of the positions you answered, never against your own defect count, so a reader who answered two exercises is scored on the same rate as one who answered twenty, and is refused a figure under the reporting floor rather than handed a better one.
Rs 999 in India inclusive of GST, or US$9.99 elsewhere, one time; 26 credits on an organisation account. Forty exercises across six formats take about twenty-five minutes. The report names a re-sitting after four weeks of the boxed if-then and prints the movement your structure index would have to exceed to count as real change rather than measurement error. No total is printed across the five parts, no percentile appears anywhere, and you are ranked against nobody.
Each one takes a single capability, puts you inside the situations where it is actually tested, and scores your choices against published evidence — with a report designed for that capability alone, not a template. They span hiring, compliance, education, operations and personal skill.
Browse the catalogue →Methodology: Forty original exercises across six formats: twelve single structural choices at a named position, eight ordering exercises, seven select-every-line grouping exercises, five counts on a slider, four match-the-following exercises pairing a heading to the message it must carry, and four editorial cases. DECLARED RESPONSE INSTRUCTION: one instruction for the whole instrument, knowledge of what the document warrants for the named reader, never what the respondent would personally write or prefer; no self-report anywhere on the form. CONSTRUCT STATEMENT: whether a writer can put the answer where a busy reader will find it, keep the opening's chain intact (the situation the reader accepts, the complication, the question it raises, the answer), group the support so the groups are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, make headings and exhibit titles carry a message rather than name a topic, and close with one ask. It does NOT measure grammar, spelling, vocabulary, English fluency, typing, tone, how much the reader enjoys writing, or how good the underlying analysis is. FRAMEWORK: the pyramid of a message above its grouped support, and the situation-complication-question-answer opening, are public constructs described in Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking (Minto International, 1987; third edition, Pearson, 2009); The Pyramid Principle is a mark of its author and this instrument is not affiliated with or endorsed by her or by any consulting firm. Every exercise here is original and no item, example or exercise from that book or any course is reproduced. SCORING DESIGN, C29 position-weighted structural defect scoring with a declared decay, reported as D11 the Two-Column Translation: each exercise sits at one of seven positions in the order a reader meets a document, subject line, first sentence, opening paragraph, second-level grouping, supporting paragraphs, exhibit, close, and each position carries a declared decay weight w(p) of 8, 7, 6, 4, 3, 2, 2, printed above the score with the reason for each step. defect_i = 1 - credit_i, credit from the structural choice at the position; loss = SUM over ANSWERED positions of w(pos_i) x defect_i; maxLoss = SUM over the same positions of w(pos_i); priorLoss = SUM over the same positions of w(pos_i) x E[defect_i] under the position's DECLARED per-option marginal; index = 100 x (priorLoss - loss) / priorLoss, so 0 is the ordinary respondent, 100 is no defect anywhere, and a negative figure is worse than the way people ordinarily answer. The decay curve is a value judgement, not a measurement; the denominator runs over the artefact's answered positions and never over the reader's own defect count; and no single position may carry more than about 35 per cent of maxLoss, with each position's share computed and printed and the curve flattened by the builder until the cap holds (on the full form the largest share is the opening paragraph at about 24 per cent). The marginals are authored the way writers actually answer, burying the answer far more often than fronting it, and their dispersion is checked (standard deviation above .02) rather than their presence. Five competencies of eight items each, each reported against the ordinary respondent with no total across them; reliability as McDonald's omega in Spearman-Brown form from an assumed inter-item correlation of .35, stated as an assumption; every figure with its SEM and its 68 and 95 per cent bands; a competency under eight answered items or omega under .70 refused a figure and given a placement word where the figure would have gone; an unanswered exercise leaves numerator, denominator and prior term together; an empty sitting scores exactly zero. SOURCES: Minto, The Pyramid Principle (1987; Pearson, 2009), for the message-above-support pyramid, the situation-complication-question-answer opening, and mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive grouping; Grice, Logic and Conversation, in Cole and Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics volume 3 (Academic Press, 1975), for the maxims of quantity and manner that a buried answer and a padded close both violate; Gopen and Swan, The Science of Scientific Writing (American Scientist, volume 78, 1990, pages 550 to 558), for the topic position, the stress position, the expectation that a subject is followed closely by its verb, and the rule of old information before new; Clark and Haviland, Comprehension and the Given-New Contract, in Freedle (ed), Discourse Production and Comprehension (Ablex, 1977), for the given-new contract behind the situation-before-complication order; Kintsch and van Dijk, Toward a Model of Text Comprehension and Production (Psychological Review, volume 85, 1978, pages 363 to 394), for the macrostructure a reader builds from a text under a working-memory limit, and van Dijk and Kintsch, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (Academic Press, 1983), for the situation model; Sweller, Cognitive Load During Problem Solving (Cognitive Science, volume 12, 1988, pages 257 to 285), for why a buried answer costs a re-read; Murdock, The Serial Position Effect of Free Recall (Journal of Experimental Psychology, volume 64, 1962, pages 482 to 488), for primacy and recency, the reason the subject line and the close are the two positions readers retain; Williams and Colomb, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (University of Chicago Press, 1990), for the clarity evidence on subjects, verbs and the placement of new information; Jansen and Steehouder, How Research Can Support Document Design (Document Design, volume 2, 2001, pages 20 to 25), for document design as a tested discipline; Redish, Reading to Learn to Do (IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, volume 32, 1989, pages 289 to 293), for the finding that workplace readers read to act, not to learn, which is why the ask is scored; Nielsen, F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content (Nielsen Norman Group, 2006, eye-tracking of 232 users on web pages), stated as it was found: on screen, readers scan in a rough F, reading the opening lines and the left edge, and the pattern is strongest when the text is not structured, which is why the remedy the authors give is to front-load the point and the headings; it is not a finding about printed business documents and is not cited as one; Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez, A Review of Multiple-Choice Item-Writing Guidelines (Applied Measurement in Education, 2002), for option-length control; Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006), for the if-then form of the one change; Jacobson and Truax, Clinical Significance (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1991), for the re-measurement threshold. All forty exercises are original works written for this instrument; no exercise from any published book, course or commercial writing assessment is reproduced or adapted; no competitor and no consulting firm is named; the instrument is not affiliated with or endorsed by any author, publisher or firm named above. Rs 999 in India inclusive of GST, US$9.99 elsewhere, 26 credits for organisations.