Did you ever read an article that seemed like it was nothing but bits and pieces of fragments and nothing really tied together? I have. Sometimes I'd read something and wonder where the heck the reader was going. And to be honest, we're all guilty of this from time to time as it is SO easy to get sidetracked. Well, this article is going to show you how to tie things together and hopefully do it WITHOUT getting sidetracked in the process.

I have found that the best way to write an article where you have many pieces that you have to tie together, is to sit down first and make an outline of what it is you want to talk about. I'm going to give you an example of what I'm talking about right here in this article itself. I hope you will be able to follow this. I'll try to make it as simple as I can.

The article I am going to outline is steroid use in baseball. It's such a hot topic right now, I figured why not? Okay, what are we going to focus on? That's the first thing. There are so many angles we can take. I'm going to focus on the users themselves and call the article "Steroid Use In Baseball...How Our Heroes Have Fallen." Great...what's next?

Well, we're going to start the article with an introduction that talks about how steroid use in baseball was a bigger problem during a certain period of time than anybody realized and as a result, many of our heroes have fallen in our eyes.

After we get the intro done, we're going to take a paragraph each and focus on one particular star. We need to decide who we're going to focus on and we want to do it in an order the takes us from least interesting (we hope) to most interesting...saving the best for last. So we start with Andy Pettitte and then work our way to Mark McGuire, Barry Bonds and finally Alex Rodriguez, who has been the latest shocker to date.

After we report on each of these fallen stars, we tie the whole thing together by talking about what they all had in common, beside the steroid use. I'll leave that decision up to you to get you thinking a little bit.The point is, everything and everyone in our story is related in some way. There are no loose ends when we finish up and nowhere in the process of writing did we stray off topic. That's the key. You don't want to talk about Alex Rodriguez and his failed marriage. That's NOT what this article is about. It's about steroid use in baseball and how our heroes have fallen.

Keep these things in mind when you write your articles and you should have no trouble tying them together nicely with a pink bow all wrapped for delivery.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim