Write for People, Structure for Machines

What Do We Mean by Structure?Michael IantoscaSenior Director of Content and Knowledge Platforms AvalaraIntroductionThe phrase “write for people, structure for machines” is often repeated but rarely explained with technical clarity. Structure is not about formatting or presentation. It is about making meaning explicit, parsable, and durable so that machines can process content deterministically while humans consume it naturally.This paper explains what structure actually means in a technical sense, why schemas matter, and why certain formats support this model while others fundamentally cannot.What Structure Really MeansStructure, in this context, refers to schema-constrained content.