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. |
Highlighting | • Adding bullets |
Boxing | 1. Numbering |
Showing color | Changing fonts |
Using bold, italics, underlining | Varying print sizes |
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.