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6.6: Organization considerations

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    25404

    • Alexandra Glynn, Kelli Hallsten-Erickson & Amy Jo Swing
    • North Hennepin Community College & Lake Superior College
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    Organization is related to the mode of writing you choose.

    Sometimes, like using spatial order for descriptive writing, the type of writing you’re doing (mode) will determine organizational structure.

    One mode that requires quite strict adherence to organization is compare and contrast. Let’s look at this mode now as an example.

    Let’s say you’re comparing four wheel drive and all-wheel drive vehicles. The audience is parents with young kids who have just moved to Minnesota from a southern state. You need to come up with points of comparison that are useful for that audience, such as:

    • Cost of the vehicle
    • Reliability over time
    • Gas mileage
    • Traction on the road

    Based on this audience and their foremost desire for safety on the treacherous winter roads, you might want to use a general order of importance to get your points of comparison in order, going from the most important point to the lesser points:

    • Traction on the road
    • Reliability over time
    • Cost of the vehicle
    • Gas mileage

    Once you’ve decided on the order of your points of comparison, you have two choices when it comes time to organize the whole essay: whole to whole or point by point.

    With whole to whole, you talk about Topic One and then Topic Two. An outline might look like this:

    Four Wheel Drive Vehicle

    • Traction on the road
    • Reliability over time
    • Cost of the vehicle
    • Gas mileage

    All-wheel Drive Vehicle

    • Traction on the road
    • Reliability over time
    • Cost of the vehicle
    • Gas mileage

    Note: The order of the points of comparison is the same for each type of vehicle.

    With point by point, those points of comparison drive the bus:

    Traction on the road

    • Four wheel drive
    • All-wheel drive

    Reliability over time

    • Four wheel drive
    • All-wheel Drive

    Cost of the vehicle

    • Four wheel drive
    • All-wheel drive

    Gas mileage

    • Four wheel drive
    • All-wheel drive

    Note: For each point of comparison, you would talk about four wheel drive vehicles first, and then move to the all-wheel drive vehicles.

    Cause and effect will lend itself better to induction and deduction. Classification will be a “most important to least important” (or vice-versa) situation.

    Again, what organizational structure do you choose? It depends on your topic and its mode, but ultimately, knowing what the audience expectations are for your piece of writing will help you make your decision.

    This page titled 6.6: Organization considerations is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Alexandra Glynn, Kelli Hallsten-Erickson & Amy Jo Swing.