If you can't summarize your bottom line in one sentence, you haven't done your analysis.
Statement of Synthesis
The focus can be called the:
Statement of synthesis.
Big picture and bottom line.
What and so what.
Core assertion.
Major judgment or point.
Or whatever your office wants to call it.
The faster you can arrive at a focus, the better an inferential thinker you will be considered.
You must create a statement of synthesis for any information you analyze and any piece you write. And a piece can have only one focus. If you have more than one major judgment to make, you have more than one piece you can write.
Express your focus in a simple declarative sentence that synthesizes information into an analytic assertion.
Answer three questions:
What? The significant departure from the norm (threshold) that allows you to write the piece.
So what? The relevance of the event or development.
Why? The motivations, reasons, or forces behind the event or development.
Often you can answer just what? and so what? in one sentence because of space constraints. You answer why? later in the piece.
No Focus, Nowhere To Go
If you don't have a focus, you can't organize your piece or begin to draft it. This is true because your piece consists of only the things that support-prove, explain, or discuss-your focus. If an insight or piece of information doesn't do this, you must leave it out.
Steps to Focusing
You need to know your readers' concerns in order to produce relevant intelligence.
When you're familiar with the issues your consumers are interested in, use the Key Intelligence Questions to ask yourself the questions you need to answer in order to make judgments relevant to those issues.
You need to reach into your information and grab the point.
Use gisting to reduce your information to manageable amounts and to identify the most important facts or points.
Then begin the conceptualization process . . .
Discipline yourself to answer at least two of the three major questions:
What? What's the significant departure form the norm? What new and unusual thing has happened?
So what? What's the consequence? Why care?
The skill is in finding the right level of generality for your focus statement:
What? "The countenarcotics program is faltering." With this focus you're looking at a country's overall program, a focus that is at a higher level of generality than . . .
What? "Opium production is surging." This focus is at a lower level of generality because it deals with just one aspect of the faltering countenarcotics program.
Which what? is right depends on which one you want to focus on and how you play your story out.
If your focus is the faltering program, you might devote one section of your piece to surging opium production.
Combine your answers to what? and so what? in one sentence and spell everything out:
What? And so what?: Lambodialand's opium harvest is likely to reach 20 tons this year-compared with 12 last year-doubling the amount of heroin the country may try to smuggle to the United States.
What? And so what?: The recent Congressionally mandated budget reduction will force us to end projects X, Y, and Z.
If you're having trouble narrowing your focus, ask yourself:
What one message do I want the reader to come away with? Or . . .
If I had the attention of my editor for only 30 seconds, what's the one thing I'd tell him about my piece?
Write your simple declarative sentence down and past it where you can refer to it.
This will help you maintain consistency of focus as you work on your piece.
And your statement of synthesis is a general roadmap to your entire piece. In its most basic form, it tells you what elements to cover in your piece and in what order.
Practice!
Skill comes with repetition.
Practice creating statements of synthesis every day. Use newspaper and magazine editorials---editorials often have more than one focus, no clear focus, or a poorly stated focus.
Corollary
Stick literally to one idea per paragraph.
If you start to tell a new story or make a new judgment, you need to put it in a new paragraph, section, or piece.
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