While you’re finding information on your topic, think about how you will group or organize that information to make it accessible and persuasive to readers. At the simplest level, writers most often group information in their writing projects according to four principles—space, time, logic, and association.

Organizing spatially

Spatial organization of texts allows the reader to “walk through,” beginning at one point and moving around in an organized manner—say, from near to far, left to right, or top to bottom. It can be especially useful when you want the audience to understand the layout of a structure or the placement of elements and people in a scene: texts such as a museum visitors’ audio guide, a written-word description of a historic battlefield, or a video tour of a new apartment might all call for spatial organization. Remember that maps, diagrams, and other graphics may help readers visualize your descriptions more effectively.

Organizing chronologically (by time)

Organization can also indicate when events occur, usually chronologically from first to last. Chronological organization is the basic method used in cookbooks, lab reports, instruction manuals, and many stories and narrative films. You may find it useful to organize information by describing or showing the sequence of events or the steps in a process.

Organizing logically

Organizing according to logic means relating pieces of information in ways that make sense. Following is an overview of some of the most commonly used logical patterns: illustration, definition, division and classification, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, problem and solution, analogy, and narration. For examples of paragraphs organized according to these logical patterns, see 5d.

Illustration

You will often gather examples to illustrate a point. If you write an essay discussing how one novelist influenced another, you might cite examples from the second writer’s books that echo themes or characters from the first writer’s works. For a pamphlet appealing for donations to the Red Cross, you might use photographs showing situations in which donations helped people in trouble, along with appropriate descriptions. For maximum effect, you may want to arrange examples in order of increasing importance unless your genre calls for an attention-grabbing initial illustration.

Definition

Often a topic can be developed by definition—by saying what something is (or is not) and perhaps by identifying the characteristics that distinguish it from things that are similar or in the same general category. If you write about poverty in your community, for example, you would have to define very carefully what level of income, assets, or other measure defines a person, family, or household as “poor.” In an essay about Pentecostalism, you might explain what characteristics separate Pentecostalism from related religious movements.

Division and classification

Division means breaking a single topic into separate parts; classification means grouping many separate items of information about a topic according to their similarities. An essay about military recruiting policies might divide the military into different branches—army, navy, air force, and so on—and examine how each recruits volunteers. For a project on women’s roles in the eighteenth century, you could organize your notes by classification: information related to women’s education, occupations, legal status, and so on.

Comparison and contrast

Comparison focuses on the similarities between two things, whereas contrast highlights their differences, but the two are often used together. If you were asked to analyze two case studies in an advertising text (one on Budweiser ads and the other on ads for the latest iPhone), you might well organize the response by presenting all the information on Budweiser advertising in one section and all on iPhone ads in another (block comparison) or by alternating between Budweiser and iPhone ads as you look at particular characteristics of each (alternating comparison).

Cause and effect

Cause-effect analysis may deal with causes, effects, or both. If you examine why something happens or happened, you are investigating causes. If you explain what has occurred or is likely to occur from a set of conditions, you are discussing effects. An environmental-impact study of the probable consequences of building a proposed dam, for instance, would focus on effects. On the other hand, a video essay on the breakdown of authority in inner-city schools might begin with the effects of the breakdown and trace them back to their causes.

Problem and solution

Moving from a problem to a solution is a natural way to organize certain kinds of information. For example, a student studying motorcycle parking on campus decided to organize his writing in just this way: he identified a problem (the need for more parking) and then offered two possible solutions, along with visuals to help readers imagine the solutions (his outline appears in 3f). Many assignments in engineering, business, and economics call for a similar organizational strategy.

Analogy

An analogy establishes connections between two things or ideas. Analogies are particularly helpful in explaining something new in terms of something very familiar. Likening the human genome to a map, for example, helps explain the complicated concept of the genome to those unfamiliar with it.

Narration

Narration involves telling a story of some kind. You might, for example, tell the story of how deer ravaged your mother’s garden as a way of showing why you support population control measures for wildlife. Narrating calls on the writer to set the story in a context readers can understand, providing any necessary background and descriptive details as well as chronological markers and transitions (later that day, the following morning, and so on) to guide readers through the story.

Organizing by association

Some writers organize information through a series of associations that grow directly out of their own experiences and memories. In doing so, they may rely on a sensory memory, such as an aroma, a sound, or a scene. Thus, associational organization is common in personal narrative, where the writer follows a chain of associations to render an experience vividly for readers, as in this description:

Combining organizational patterns

In much of your writing, you will want to use two or more principles of organization. You might, for example, combine several passages of narration with vivid examples to make a striking comparison, as one student did in an essay about the dramatic differences between her life in her Zuñi community and her life as a teacher in Seattle. In addition, you may want to include not only visuals but sound and other multimedia effects as well.

Emily Lesk’s organizational patterns

Emily Lesk begins the final draft of her essay (4l) with what she calls a “confession”: I don’t drink Coke. She follows this opening with an anecdote about a trip to Israel during which she nevertheless bought a T-shirt featuring the Coca-Cola logo. She goes on to explore what lies behind this purchase, relating it to the masterful advertising campaigns of the Coca-Cola Company and illustrating the way that the company’s advertising “sells” a certain kind of American identity along with its products. She closes her draft by reflecting on the implications of this relationship between corporate advertising and national identity. Thus her essay, which begins with a personal experience, combines the patterns of narrative with cause-effect and comparison.

For Multilingual Writers: Organizing information