4: Arrangement

History of Arrangement 

Arrangement is one of the five canons traditionally taught to classical rhetoric students:  

invention (generating ideas),  

arrangement (organization and order),  

style (words and grammar),  

memory (memorization),  

delivery (speaking or writing).  

Classical rhetoric pertained to speeches, with arrangement helping orators decide the argument sequence that would make their points most effectively. Most teachers of classical rhetoric agreed, for example, that one should start with an introduction, focusing on establishing one’s ethos, and end with a conclusion, when one makes a main point to be as memorable as possible, often by evoking the relevant emotions in the audience (pathos). The Roman philosopher Cicero added four other sections between the introduction and conclusion:  

1. a statement of facts or the background of the issue;  

2. a division between ideas;  

3. proof or evidence supporting the ideas;  

4. refutation, or the countering of other people’s ideas.  

While different teachers taught different rules for arrangement, the general principle remained the same—that we need to organize our speeches in a certain way so that they are effective in conveying our meaning. 

Even today, when you learned the rules for how to write five-paragraph essays or lab reports, you were learning arrangement; when you have produced texts in these genres, you have experienced the influence of classical rhetoric. In this context, arrangement is similar to organization. More recently, arrangement also refers to the visual placement of pieces of a text on a page or a screen, and so this concept also overlaps with design and layout. This spatial understanding of arrangement is relatively new for most writers, but word processing and other programs make it increasingly easy for everyone with access to a computer to create and manipulate the visual design of texts. (See the chapter on Image for more discussion of how visual elements interact with other elements on the page; alternately, the field of Graphic Design explores these concepts in considerably more detail.) 

Using the same term for both the organization of ideas in alphabetic text and speech and the placement of visual elements on the page suggests that the practices interrelate profoundly and that both are important for achieving your communication goals. 

Arrangement Today 

The rules for organizing print and speech are usually very specific to the different genres you will produce. In this chapter we will focus on arranging elements visually on a page or screen, which can be relevant to many genres and media.  

In Reading Images, authors Kress and van Leeuwen write about the “grammar of images,” identifying three different things to think about as we arrange or analyze visual spaces, whether they are single images or entire, multimodal pages:  

1. Information Value: Consider the elements at the left, right, top, bottom, center, and margin of a space. Items on the left are usually about what we already know as common sense or self-evident, while things on the right are new information or ideas that we should pay closer attention to or may not automatically agree with (Reading Images 181). 

2. Salience: Figure out what is most noticeable in a space. Something might be more noticeable if it’s in the foreground, if it’s larger, or if it’s clearer (201).  

3. Framing: Some images use lines on the page to divide it up, creating an inside and outside to the image (203). 

When elements of a page or image are arranged at the top and bottom, we see “what has been placed at the top is presented as the Ideal, and what has been placed at the bottom is put forward as the Real” (186). By Ideal, the authors mean general or aspirational ideas, while Real conveys facts, details, or examples.  

For example, in this old ad from the Leslie Shoe House, you’re lured in by the aspirational statement “Regain the Joy of Youthful Feet” at the top of the page, with silhouettes of people walking, one in high heels and one in business loafers. Notice how the ad divides its sales pitch into vertical columns: the slogans under the high heels aim to attract female customers while the slogans under the business loafers target male buyers. The wide slogan “A New Thrill in Foot Happiness” joins the two columns back into one to promote the name of the business and its address.  As the reader’s eyes move down the page, they are brought from the ideal space (regaining youthful foot joy) toward the details of that journey, which ends at the “Shoe House of Quality” on Front Street in Belleville, Ontario. 

Finally, when the arrangement creates an obvious center and margins in a page or image—which Kress and van Leeuwen say is relatively uncommon in Western cultures (194)—then the elements at the center are most important, and everything around them is dependent or secondary information. We see this arrangement in broadcast media such as 24-hour news channels, with a stock ticker, headlines, and other graphics surrounding the presenters. We also see similar arrangements on Twitch streams, where the focus of the stream is in the middle, and the elements around the edge supplement the central focus.  However, despite how flexible modern authoring tools are, many platforms make it difficult to manipulate arrangement. Most social media sites such as Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok allow you to upload content in the form of alphabetic text, images, videos, music, links, and so on, but they give you very little choice in how you arrange that content on your page.  

Take the way profile pictures function as an example. We might worry about what photo to upload for our profile picture or use that space to make a statement of some kind, as in when people use logos or symbols to signal their allegiance to a cause (see Kairos for more about how this kind of writing happens). In other words, we take seriously how the profile picture contributes to our ethos. However, we don’t have any control over the placement of the photo relative to the rest of the content—the photo is usually on the left. In some respects, this makes sense. As Kress and van Leeuwen point out, we take information on the left to be given or self-evident, and presume new information is on the right. (By contrast, Tik-Tok has our profile picture and other information on the right-hand side of our screen, which may stem from the fact that traditionally Chinese is read from top to bottom, right to left; Tik-Tok was created by a Chinese company. Recently Mandarin has begun to be written from left to right, but perhaps the cultural significance of “right first” still holds sway among Chinese writers.) Our physical appearance, on the left, is a given, but our status update or story, appearing on the right, is new.  

The locked-down arrangement of the platform has an ideological effect as well—it homogenizes us. The profile picture functions in a similar way as the picture on our driver’s license, passport, and various ID cards, and its placement relative to the content—to the left—is the same as well. By participating in these systems, we are complicit in the blurring of our legal, social, and personal selves, and given the financial interests of a site like Instagram, our identity has become monetized. Arrangement in these situations is a form of control, and by participating, we endorse that control.  

When working with sound, image, and moving image simultaneously, you need to think about the affordances of the different elements and their orientations in both space and time. For example, TikTok creator Elise Meyers uses a direct style that suits the intimate nature of the platform, but she also makes skilled use of arrangement in crafting her videos. In the example below, she uses a very close shot, placing her face in the upper portion of the screen, taking up most of the image. As she tells her story, she uses the “text” and “stickers” features to add visual elements to the image, overlaying them on top of her face. While this might seem counter-intuitive (isn’t her face the most important part?), Meyers grasps a key aspect of the platform—attention economy. The stickers and text provide visual variety that amplify the details of the story, but they also keep the image in motion despite the lack of motion in the content. She also uses different camera angles to offer an aside to the story (which is especially funny since we are the same audience in both parts of the video). Of course, Meyers also makes use of hashtags and subtitles, accommodating different kinds of viewing experiences.  

Arrangement and Other Concepts  

One of the key assumptions shaping many of the ideas in this text is the idea that you are going to be working in English, or another language that reads the same way, from left to right, and top to bottom. This text’s presumptions about where important information goes, what order our eyes will use to track information, and what assumptions we’ll make about the importance of elements on the page all stem from the established traditions of English usage. Many languages, by contrast, read from right to left (as mentioned in the context of TikTok’s arrangement, above). Speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Hebrew will thus have a different set of assumptions about what’s important on the page because they are used to examining pages in a different order. When you work in spaces with other communities, you will need to consider how those communities understand arrangement differently. 

For example, in a 2010 study published in Cognitive Science, authors Orly Fuhrman and Lera Boroditsky discuss how “spatial layouts created to represent time may differ across cultures.”  In a series of tests with English and Hebrew speakers, the authors found that English speakers tended to see things on the left (in a group of images in a row, for example) as “before” images on the right. Hebrew speakers tended to see things on the right as happening first. Thus, if you are arranging three images in a line, it’s worth thinking about how your audience might perceive those images, and what choices you can make to ensure that the arrangement conveys what you intend. 

As with all aspects of your writing, it’s crucial to take audience and circulation into account as you consider arrangement. The communities that will read your text will bring their own assumptions and experiences with them, and arrangement can help smooth the path for you to communicate effectively with them. 

Arrangement matters a lot when you’re working in a genre about which readers have firm expectations. For example, resumes typically have predictable arrangements; there’s an expected order in which you provide details about your education, your job experiences, your skills. However, different professions arrange their resumes differently and even have different categories of information, and it’s important to learn what arrangement your field expects. According to a study by the employment firm The Ladders titled “Why Do Recruiters Spend Only 7.4 Seconds on Resumes?”, recruiters look at a resume for an average of 7.4 seconds, and the visual arrangement of the different pieces of information can affect the success of the resume. With such a short opportunity to catch your reader’s attention, it’s crucial that you consider audience and circulation in addition to arrangement. 

Yet while many genres maintain strict rules for arrangement, it also presents opportunity for a lot of creativity. Remixes in music and other media, for instance, are primarily about arrangement. We take pieces of other people’s work, add some of our own, and rearrange them to communicate an entirely new idea. Arrangement also helps us take advantage of the affordances that different elements have in different media. Whether to put the image at the top, bottom, left, or right of the page is in part determined by what the image can do that the other elements can’t. Moreover, the juxtaposition of different elements will create meaning that the elements alone can’t achieve. Again, this is where creativity is important. 

Considering arrangement in multimodal compositions also means looking at alphabetic text differently. Not only do we need to consider the organization of our ideas within the chunks of alphabetic text, but we also need to think about how to arrange the alphabetic text in relation to the other modes, to see the chunks of text as a visual element of our composition (as in the Elise Meyers example above). We can change the size and shape of the chunks of text to arrange them effectively on the page or screen, and we can place them anywhere we want on the page relative to other modes. This practice, broadly, is referred to as graphic design.  

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