6.4: Ways to organize

You have several options for organizing your ideas: chronological order, spatial order, or order of importance.

Chronological order

Chronological, or time, order is used when relating events in which time plays a crucial role. It’s the easiest of the organizational structures because it’s one we’ve used as humans since we started telling each other stories: “Once upon a time…” It’s 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’re directing a reader how to do something, putting things in chronological order makes sense. For example, you might write an essay about Google. If you're 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're writing about Frederick Douglass, for example, a chronological outline might look something like this:

1. Early Life

a. Parents
b. Separation from mother

2. Teenage years

a. Learning to read

b. Tutoring other slaves

c. Punishment

3. Escape from slavery

a. Unsuccessful attempt

b. Successful escape

4. Free years

a. Marriage

b. Work as an abolitionist and preacher

Spatial order

Spatial order, or space order, is often used when you’re describing. 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’ll 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:

I. Before I get to the scene

a. Walking down the street

i. Passing people

ii. A dog barks viciously

iii. Hear the sirens

II. Seeing the scene from afar

a. Three cars

i. One is halfway up a light pole

ii. Another is jammed up behind the first

iii. A third has t-boned the second

b. Emergency vehicles

c. Crowd of people

III. Getting close up to the scene

a. People on stretchers

b. Firefighters putting out the blaze

c. A woman screaming

d. An elderly woman's dismissive comments

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:

• General to specific (commonly called deduction): Moving from general ideas to more specific ideas
• Specific to general (commonly called induction): Moving from specific ideas to more general ideas
• Most to least critical: Making your strongest point first and then bringing up less critical ideas
• Least to most critical: Bringing up less critical points early on to build up into the most important point of all