To write your paragraph, you had to decide on an approach to the topic that would be appropriate to your writing situation, your purpose, audience, genre, and medium. For example, if you wanted to write a blog post to express your thoughts and feelings to your friends, you might have chosen to tell a story about what the people in one of the photographs are doing or how they got there (narration). If you were writing an exam for your psychology instructor, you might have described the response to environmental cues (process analysis) or analyzed the differences among responses in the two settings (comparison and contrast).

Many paragraphs and essays use specific patterns of development (also called rhetorical modes, or just modes) like narration, process analysis, and comparison or contrast, because they help the writer

(To learn more about the writing situation, see Using the Patterns of Development.)

The patterns also help readers understand by comparing something they know well with something unfamiliar or describing a place they’ve never been so that they can picture it, for example.

While some authors write essays that focus mainly on a single mode, many others create essays from paragraphs in a variety of patterns, choosing among the patterns that will best help them achieve their goals.

In Chapters 11 to 20, you will read and write essays that focus mainly on one mode. In this chapter, you will find one mixed-mode reading, and the chapters in Parts 3 and 4 also include a reading that uses a variety of patterns to supplement the main one. As you read these essays and write your own mixed-mode essay later in this chapter, think about how writers use patterns to achieve their goals.