Article outline where every section carries its own first line

An outline that a second person could draft from without asking a question. Each section carries the sentence it has to open with, the job it does in the argument, and the condition under which it should be deleted. The last one removes more sections than it keeps.

The worked example

Run with the topic “how to price a monthly retainer, for people running small marketing agencies who currently quote by gut” and the thing most articles do not say: “the number that decides whether a retainer is profitable is not the rate, it is how many hours of unbilled account management each client absorbs, and almost nobody measures it per client”:

TITLE

1. How to price a monthly retainer when you cannot predict the hours
2. The retainer cost that never makes it into the spreadsheet

THE ANSWER Price a retainer on the capacity a client will absorb, not the deliverables you scoped. Most retainers are quoted against a list of outputs and lost to the calls, the revisions and the reporting around them. Measure that overhead per client for one month, then set the rate against the measurement.

What a retainer actually sells FIRST LINE: A retainer sells capacity, and a deliverable list sells outputs, and the two are priced by different arithmetic. JOB: DEFINE CUT IF: your reader already prices by capacity and knows it, in which case this is four paragraphs before the first useful sentence.

The three ways agencies price, and what each one hides FIRST LINE: Every pricing model is honest about one cost and silent about another, and which one it hides is the whole of the decision. JOB: OPTIONS CUT IF: nothing. It is short and it is the vocabulary the rest of the piece uses.

• By deliverable
• By hours
• By outcome

Account management is the largest variable cost and nobody meters it FIRST LINE: The hours that decide whether a retainer is profitable are the ones nobody writes on a timesheet, because they arrive as messages, calls and small revisions rather than as work. [NEEDS EVIDENCE: your own tracked hours across three clients for one month, split billable and not] JOB: EVIDENCE CUT IF: it cannot be cut. This is the article.

Metering your own overhead for one month FIRST LINE: Start by logging every minute spent on a client that is not the work you quoted, tagged by which client it was for. JOB: PROCEDURE CUT IF: nothing.

Setting the rate once you have the number FIRST LINE: Take the measured overhead per client, add it to the scoped hours, and price the total at the rate you thought you were charging. JOB: PROCEDURE CUT IF: your reader’s problem is winning work rather than keeping it, in which case this becomes a paragraph.

The client you should decline instead of repricing FIRST LINE: Some clients absorb more overhead than any rate can carry, and the signal is that the overhead grows every month rather than settling. JOB: DECISION CUT IF: nothing.

What changes when the client is very small FIRST LINE: Below a certain size the fixed cost of having a client at all dominates everything above, and per hour arithmetic stops describing the situation. JOB: COUNTERARGUMENT CUT IF: your audience only takes clients above a floor, which many do.

SECTIONS I DID NOT INCLUDE

• Retainer versus project work. A different article, and one your reader has probably already decided.
• Raising prices on existing clients. Genuinely bigger than a section. Put it in the piece and it takes over.
• A sample retainer agreement. A template, not a section. It would double the length and be the only thing anyone reads.
• Industry benchmark rates. Would have to be invented or cited from somewhere you have not checked, and rule 3 does not allow either.

The line that does the most work

CUT IF is the only field here that removes something, and it is the reason this produces an outline of eight sections rather than an outline of fourteen.

Ask any model for an outline and it returns coverage, because coverage is what the average of every article on a subject looks like. The cut condition forces each section to name the reader who does not need it, and when a writer reads those conditions against their actual audience, one or two sections fail immediately. In the example above, the first section is the obvious casualty: an agency owner reading an article about retainer pricing does not need four paragraphs on what a retainer is.

The section that comes back saying it cannot be cut is worth noticing for the opposite reason. It is the argument, and it is usually the only part of the piece that could not have been written by somebody else.

Reading the first lines as a paragraph

The other check worth doing before drafting takes half a minute. Read every FIRST LINE in order and ignore the headings entirely. In the example, that produces a compressed version of the argument that runs from what a retainer sells, through what each pricing model conceals, to the unmetered cost, the measurement, the rate, and the two edge cases.

If that paragraph jumps, a section is missing. If two lines say nearly the same thing, two sections are one. Both are cheap to fix at this stage and expensive after the draft exists.

Once the piece is written, run it through the heading structure checker to confirm the outline survived the drafting, which it frequently does not.

You are outlining one article. Output the outline first, with no preamble.

Start with two things:

TITLE
Two working titles. One that says what the article is, one that says what it
argues. Under 65 characters each.

THE ANSWER
Forty to sixty words that answer the article's question outright. If a reader
read only this, they should have the answer and know what they would gain by
reading on. Do not tease and do not summarise the sections.

Then the outline. Every H2 gets exactly four lines, in this order:

- The heading itself. Sentence case. Say what the section establishes, not
  what it is "about".
- FIRST LINE: the sentence the section must open with, written out in full.
  It states the section's point rather than introducing it, and it makes
  sense read on its own with nothing above it.
- JOB: one of DEFINE, OPTIONS, EVIDENCE, PROCEDURE, COUNTERARGUMENT,
  DECISION. Each job may appear at most twice in the whole outline.
- CUT IF: the condition under which this section should be deleted. If the
  honest answer is that it cannot be cut because it is the argument of the
  article, say so in those terms.

Add H3s only where a section genuinely splits into parallel items, and give
each H3 its heading only, no other lines.

Rules:

1. Between five and eight H2 sections. An outline with twelve is a table of
   contents for something nobody will finish.
2. Headings descend one level at a time. Never an H2 followed by an H4, never
   a heading with no text under it.
3. Never invent a statistic, a study, a date, a company or a source. If a
   section needs evidence, the FIRST LINE says what the evidence has to show
   and marks it [NEEDS EVIDENCE: what would settle this].
4. No section may be called Introduction, Conclusion, Overview, Key Takeaways
   or Final Thoughts. If a section cannot be given a heading that says
   something, it should not exist.
5. The thing I told you that most articles do not say must be the argument of
   exactly one section, and that section may not be first.

Finish with:

SECTIONS I DID NOT INCLUDE
Three to five things a reader might expect that you deliberately left out,
each with one line on why: a different article, too small for a section, or
something the piece would have to invent to cover.

What the article is about and who reads it: [TOPIC AND READER]
What I know that most articles do not say: [THE THING]