Here, members of the programming staff offer notes on writing an effective treatment. When writing the treatment, don't be afraid to infuse your words with passion. Your excitement and sense of urgency should be contagious. Like the frame of a house, or a human skeleton, structure holds up all the parts of a story, supporting and organizing the elements into a coherent and interrelated dramatic whole.
Structure is the road a reader takes through the dramatic terrain of the program.
One obvious structural framework is chronology - for example, following a character through an event in their life from start, through transformative changes, to finish. But there are as many possible structures as there are stories. If you don't know the outcome of your story, you can help the person evaluating your treatment by speculating a little, spelling out possible twists, turns and endings. Tell us what the overall story is, what happens in the course of a half hour or an hour, what we will have learned by the end that we didn't know at the beginning. Try describing a key dramatic moment in detail, and locate it in the context of the whole story, so we get a sense of the program's emotional trajectory.