21 4.1 Organization

Organizing Ideas

When you write, you need to organize your ideas in an order that makes sense. The writing you complete in all your courses exposes how analytically and critically your mind works. In some courses, the only direct contact you may have with your instructor is through the assignments you write for the course. You can make a good impression by spending time ordering your ideas.

Order refers to your choice of what to present first, second, third, and so on in your writing. The order you pick closely relates to your purpose for writing that particular assignment. For example, when telling a story, it may be important to first describe the background for the action. Or you may need to first describe a 3-D movie projector or a television studio to help readers visualize the setting and scene. You may want to group your support effectively to convince readers that your point of view on an issue is well-reasoned and worthy of belief.

In longer pieces of writing, you may organize different parts in different ways so that your purpose stands out clearly and all parts of the paper work together to consistently develop your main point.

Chronological order

Chronological, or time, order is used when relating events in which time plays a crucial role. It is the easiest of the organizational structures because it’s one we have used as humans since we started telling each other stories: “Once upon a time…” It is used all the time in the working world, too. For example, in healthcare, charting will often use chronological order to explain when things happened. This is a great structure to use when time is of the essence. The same is true for a police report, to take another example.
If it matters when things happened or you are directing a reader on how to do something, putting things in chronological order makes sense. For example, you might write an essay about Google. If you are talking about how it became the most popular search engine, you would utilize chronological order to describe its ascent to domination. Another example would be a biography. If you are writing about Frederick Douglass, for example, a chronological outline might look something like this:

Compare and contrast

Compare and contrast is often used when you or your audience has a choice to make. This type of writing is based on comparing two or more items or ideas using specific criteria (or character traits shared by the items or ideas).  At work, you might use compare and contrast to write a report about products or services your company is choosing between. In school, you might compare and contrast two different movies or poems. An example of this type of writing might be comparing and contrasting two local restaurants using specific criteria:

Cause and effect

Cause and effect is when you are trying to show or determine the causes and/or effects of an action or experience. When you are at work, you might tell a customer the causes and effects of choosing to fix their car in the way you suggest. At school, you might write an essay on the effects of World War II on the country’s economy. Let’s look at the effects of going to college:

Spatial order

Spatial order, or space order, is often used when you are describing something. This one is also easy because when you deploy it, you act like a video camera: describing from right to left or vice versa, or from the top to the bottom or vice versa. In the working world, civil engineers, for example, would find spatial order to be extremely important when looking at road design plans. Sometimes description is the major role of an essay, but more frequently, you will use description within a single paragraph and will then consider spatial order for that segment only. An example might be describing a treehouse you had as a child, or it could be describing the scene of an accident. An outline for an essay on this topic using spatial order might look like this:

Problem solution

Problem solution organization is used a lot in the workplace. It is where you have a problem and your job is to come up with one or more possible solutions. In the workplace, your boss might have you write a report on possible solutions to budget cuts that need to be made. Another example might be your company needs more space and you are given the task of coming up with solutions:

Order of importance

Now, order of importance is the most common organizational structure, but it can be tricky. You can look at it in several ways:

How about an example? Let’s say you want to discuss the benefits of long-distance running. You might have the following points:

How would you organize these points using order of importance? It is, of course, a matter of judgment. Which of these points is most important to you as the writer and, even more importantly, to your audience? Let’s say your audience is first-year college student women who have never run before and want to avoid the “Freshman Fifteen.” You might want to hit them with the most important points first, to catch their attention, and then move to the other benefits, like this:

If your audience is middle-aged people who need to unwind from their days in a healthy way, it might make more sense to start with the less “important,” or more obvious to that audience, points and then build to the more compelling points that will convince them to give it a try:

Audience is critical when deciding on an organizational structure. To look at this topic of running from a slightly different perspective, what if you wanted to write about the reasons why running is difficult? What if your audience included mostly personal trainers? You might organize from the specific ideas to the more general ideas:

If you happen to be a personal trainer or you know a lot about running and your audience is middle-aged runners who have started and quit running programs over and over, you might go from the more general ideas to the more specific ideas: