Competitive Communication: A Rhetoric for Modern Business

Despite the countless number of composition and rhetoric texts dealing with arrangement, we know very little about order in composition. In many texts, arrangement is either neglected or its treatment is woefully inadequate.

-- Frank D'Angelo, A Conceptual Theory of Rhetoric

Audience probably matters more than anything when a good writer orders business prose. In fact, writers through the centuries have devised (usually on psychological grounds) a number of arrangement strategies (several of them related) calculated to win the assent of neutral or skeptical readers.

-- Jack Selzer, Arranging Business Prose

Just as planning the proofline follows a procedure, so does presenting the plan in a document. Whether the document is a memo, report, or letter, the procedure will be the same, and the writer will use the parts of the proofline to generate the parts of the document. This means that words and sentences within the proofline will become sentences and paragraphs within the document. When the document is completed, it will still represent the ideas of the proofline, but it will represent them in a fully developed form, in a form that is strategically intended for the reader.

Illustrating a procedure for presenting the proofline in the document will require a proofline. For this example, the writer will be using the proofline in Figure 5.1. The argument is about a familiar topic in modern business, telecommuting, an activity that involves employees working at home with a computer and modern to send and receive work. The writer's reader is skeptical about this proposal because telecommuting is an activity that is difficult to supervise.

The writer will use the claim first but will place it almost last in the document. After the recommendation statement, the claim is the first element the writer produces

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