Grouping Your Ideas
While exploring a topic, you will usually find a few ideas that seem to belong together — two facts on New York traffic jams, four actions of New York drivers, three problems with New York streets. But similar ideas seldom appear together in your notes because you did not discover them all at the same time. For this reason, you need to sort your ideas into groups and arrange them in sequences. Here are six ways to work:
| Organization | Movement | Typical Use | Example |
| Spatial | Left to right, right to left, bottom to top, top to bottom, front to back, outside to inside |
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Describe an ocean vista, moving from the tidepools on the rocky shore to the plastic buoys floating offshore to the sparkling water meeting the sunset sky. |
| Chronological | What happens first, second, and next, continuing until the end |
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Narrate the events that led up to an accident: leaving home late, stopping for an errand, checking messages while rushing along the highway, racing up to the intersection. |
| Logical | General to specific (or the reverse), least important to most, cause to effect, problem to solution |
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Analyze the effects of last year’s storms by selecting four major consequences, placing the most important one last for emphasis. |
- Rainbow connections. List the main points you’re going to express. Highlight points that go together with the same color. When you write, follow the color code, and integrate related ideas at the same time.
- Emphasizing ideas. Make a copy of your file of ideas or notes. Use your software tools to highlight, categorize, and shape your thinking by grouping or distinguishing ideas. Mark similar or related ideas in the same way; call out major points. Then move related materials into groups.
Highlighting • Adding bullets Boxing 1. Numbering Showing color Changing fonts Using bold, italics, underlining Varying print sizes - Linking. List major points, and then draw lines (in color if you wish) to link related ideas. Figure 20.1 illustrates a linked list for an essay on Manhattan driving. The writer has connected related points, numbered their sequence, and supplied each group with a heading. Each heading will probably inspire a topic sentence to introduce a major division of the essay. Because one point, chauffeured luxury cars, failed to relate to any other, the writer has a choice: drop it or develop it.
- Solitaire. Collect notes and ideas on roomy (5-by-8-inch) file cards, especially to write about literature or research. To organize, spread out the cards; arrange and rearrange them. When each idea seems to lead to the next, gather the cards into a deck in this order. As you write, deal yourself a card at a time, and turn its contents into sentences.
- Slide show. Use presentation software to write your notes and ideas on “slides.” When you’re done, view your slides one by one or as a collection. Sort your slides into the most promising order.
- Clustering. Clustering is a visual method for generating as well as grouping ideas. In the middle of a page, write your topic in a word or a phrase. Then think of the major divisions into which you might break your topic. For an essay on Manhattan drivers, your major divisions might be types of drivers: (1) taxi drivers, (2) bus drivers, (3) truck drivers, (4) New York drivers of private cars, and (5) out-of-town drivers of private cars. Arrange these divisions around your topic, circle them, and draw lines out from the major topic. You now have a rough plan for an essay. (See Figure 20.2.)
Around each division, make another cluster of details you might include — examples, illustrations, facts, statistics, opinions. Circle each specific item, connect it to the appropriate type of driver, and then expand the details into a paragraph. This technique lets you know where you have enough specific information to make your paper clear and interesting — and where you don’t. If one subtopic has no small circles around it (such as “Bus Drivers” in Figure 20.2), either add specifics to expand it or drop it.
