Our brains have difficulty in coping with two functions at the same
time. A farmer decides what kinds of crop he wants to plant before
actually planting them out. His daughter collects her flowers before
arranging them in a vase. The same should be true for planning a
talk---collect your ideas before trying to decide how you will organ-
ize them.

When you have made a rough set of notes of main ideas you have
on the topic, you then go through them and decide which ones you
would want to develop in your talk. The task now is to discard those
you think are not relevant for your particular audience.
For an introductory talk of the kind we have imagined, the farmers
would have the following questions in mind:
 what are the main recommendations of the project?
 how do they relate to their own situation and
 problems?
 what do the new storage structures look like?
 how do they compare with their existing storage
 systems?
 what are the advantages of adopting the
 recommendations?
 what are the costs?
 how can they get more information?
They would not be so interested in the history of the project, the
intricacies of the relationship between the Ministry of Agriculture
and the sponsoring or implementing agencies. So you could cross
out in you notes points like "history", "staffing of the project",
"funding" and "training of staff".
You are now able to think about how you are going to order your
material-arrange the points you have selected in a logical se-
quence that will give your talk a coherent structure.

Coherence in the Organization
Given the ideas already scribbled down on the subject of the On-
Farm Grain Storage Project, and given your assessment of what
would be relevant for the specific occasion, your outline for the talk
could look something like this: