Thank You Note Template

Invitation Letter Template Awesome Invitation to Bid Letter from thank you note template , image source: emets.org

It might seem like an easy step. Simply open a new file and start typing, right? But it’s rare for that to work for me. I love to have a solid working name and an outline before I write too much. John’s written about this earlier, after he discovered he could speed up his writing procedure ~600% by creating an outline first.
As I wrote an outline for a post this week I realised I was repeating the exact same process for every single new article I work on. Like any good programmer, I realised repeating the same work over and above means that is probably a fantastic opportunity for automation.

So I decided to make some templates for myself.
I began by creating a template for my common Ghost blog post arrangement. Since that structure’s particular to mepersonally, I created a template based on how John structures his articles, and another according to a writer whose work I respect.

For every template I’ve made a gist to show you exactly what they look like. They’re only Markdown documents, so go ahead and save them, rename them if you prefer, and copy-and-paste the contents into a new file whenever you’re ready to write. Click on the”view raw” link on the bottom of every list to observe the plain text version, which you can copy to a new file in your favourite writing program.
With this template, I can begin by answering each dot line using a couple of notes about what I need to write in that section. By the time I’m done, I’ll have a rough sketch of what the finished piece will look like. This should make it easier to enlarge my notes into fully-formed paragraphs and make them flow to each other well, since I understand the arrangement of the whole piece in advance.

Using the template, I found that my outlining process became much more involved. I’d really planned to do a full rough draft of the post in the morning, but it took me a few hours just to get the outline done, so that I put off the draft for another day.

On the other hand, I had over 1600 words composed in my outline, along with a good idea of what each section would contain and how they would work together to create a sense of flow from the article. Even though outlining took longer than usual, drafting took time since I’d put myself up for success. Composing the draft was only a matter of taking each chunk of notes out of the outline and filling it out into a readable paragraph or two.
It was quite a different process to the way I normally do the job, and I had been tempted a couple of times to avoid the additional research or thinking required to complete the outline correctly. I frequently put off these things till I’m drafting, which is when I must be focused on writing instead. I stuck to it, however, and by the time I got around to writing the draft I was grateful I’d had.
I’ve really coined my outline and research procedure by applying this template. It’s a more effective part of the procedure now, and makes printing easier. Hopefully it will lead to better work, also.