As we explain in Chapter 6: The Writing Process, much about your essay may change during drafting and revision, including the way it is organized. However, you should still think carefully about organization as you plan your paper by using planning strategies such as mind mapping and outlining. There are many benefits to doing so, for both you and your readers. For you, choosing an organizational pattern and creating a preliminary outline ensures that each body paragraph supports and develops your thesis. It gives your ideas a path that you can follow as you develop your draft. Further, knowing how you will organize your paragraphs allows you to better express and analyze your thoughts. It can help you to conduct more effective and targeted research or to recognize areas of your draft that are underdeveloped.

Thinking about organization early on also helps you to keep your audience firmly in mind throughout the writing process. A clear organization is essential for your readers to understand your message and to stay focused on the details of your argument. It helps them to draw connections between your body paragraphs and your thesis, thereby allowing them to process your ideas and (hopefully) accept them. When it comes to communicating with your audience and fulfilling your purpose with a piece of writing, organization is just as important as content.

As you plan the organization of your essay, think first about the assignment you have been given, your purpose for writing, and the thesis that you want to communicate. Doing so will give you the best chance of developing an organization that suits your needs and fulfills your audience’s expectations.

Consider Your Assignment

There are many common patterns of organization in academic writing, basic structures that can help you to communicate your ideas and move from one idea to the next. These patterns can be used individually or in combination with each other to illustrate complex relationships between ideas. Some of these include cause/effect, comparison/contrast, problem/solution, summary/response, and theory/application, among others.

When faced with a new writing task in one of your classes, the first way you can determine how your essay should be organized is by reviewing the assignment. Very often, your instructor will specify how your writing should be organized, often asking you to use one of the patterns mentioned above. In English 161, for example, your instructor will ask you to write a summary/response essay. This assignment calls for a two-part organization. First, you will provide an objective summary of one of your course texts. Then, you will respond to the text by reflecting on its ideas or critiquing its argument.

Bear in mind, this does not necessarily mean that your instructor wants you to have only two paragraphs in the body of your summary/response essay. (It may require several paragraphs to summarize the text thoroughly and to respond to it thoughtfully.) Rather, it means that your instructor wants you to provide information to your reader in two stages: your reader needs to know what a text says (summary) before your reader can understand what you have to say about it (response).

Paying close attention to your assignment is especially important if your instructor has asked you to include specific sections of information that you may not be familiar with as a new academic writer. Among their body paragraphs, academic essays commonly include paragraphs where the writer defines a key term or explains an analytical concept that will be discussed throughout the rest of the paper. There are also often paragraphs that provide important context or background information, such as an explanation of what other writers have written about your chosen topic. Additionally, an academic essay that presents a strong argument frequently includes paragraphs that acknowledge counterarguments or alternative perspectives on the issue under consideration. If the assignment requires you to include these types of information, it also likely asks you to organize them in a particular way.

If you are confused about how your instructor has asked you to organize your essay, the best thing that you can do is review the assignment and then ask your instructor for clarification.

Consider Your Purpose

Even when your instructor requires you to use a particular pattern of organization in your essay, it may still be up to you to decide how to organize the individual paragraphs within each section of information. To do that successfully, you will have to figure out what order makes the best logical sense to achieve your purpose.

Let’s consider the summary/response essay again as an example. Unless your instructor specifies otherwise, the paragraphs in your summary section will probably reflect the organization of the text you are summarizing. For example, if you are summarizing Adam Alter’s TED Talk, “Why Our Screens Make Us Less Happy,” you will first summarize what Alter says about how screen time affects our mood before you summarize his suggestions for better managing our screen time. Because Alter presents his ideas in a deliberate, meaningful order (problem and then solution), when summarizing his presentation, your goal will be to reproduce that order.

But how will you organize the paragraphs that come next, the paragraphs in which you respond to Alter’s presentation? That all depends on the purpose of your response. If your goal is to critique his suggestions for managing screen time, then you might group them (and the paragraphs in which you discuss them) into those that seem more and less realistic to you. If your goal is to evaluate the evidence that Alter uses to support his argument, then your response paragraphs might discuss his evidence from the most to least convincing (or vice versa). You might also categorize and discuss Alter’s evidence by type: findings from scientific studies, personal anecdotes, etc. Alternatively, if your goal is to draw connections between Alter’s observations and your own experience, then your response paragraphs might first explain what Alter’s ideas reveal to you about your personal technology habits before explaining what they reveal about the habits of others whom you have observed.

There are a lot of possibilities, and each of them is logical in its own way. However, each type of organization is also best suited for a particular purpose, whether that is systematically evaluating Alter’s writing choices or drawing meaningful connections between his writing and your life. It’s your task as a writer to think about what your purpose is and how the organization of your essay can help you to achieve it.

Consider Your Thesis

The thesis statement of your essay works like a roadmap for your readers. It tells them what your argument is and what main ideas they can expect to see supporting that argument in the rest of your essay. In other words, it can be a window into the organization of your essay, and it can serve you, the writer, in much the same way as you prepare to draft.

Though your thesis may change as you draft your essay, even a preliminary working thesis can help you to plan out your organization. That’s because a thesis not only states what your argument is; it also often gives a sense of how you will make your argument. For example, consider this sample thesis from Chapter 7: Thesis Statements:

Teenagers and young adults seem to use their phones everywhere—in the classroom, at the dinner table, even in restroom stalls—because they want to stay connected to their peers at all times, but I think spending all that time online is detrimental to their social skills and mental health.

Notice how this thesis can be divided into two parts. First, there’s a common situation that the writer wants to bring to our attention: young people are using their phones everywhere in order to stay connected. Second, this situation is causing problems: impairments to social skills and mental health. If you were to write an essay using this thesis, it would make sense for the body of your essay to have the same two parts. It would also make sense to organize this information in exactly the same order that it is mentioned in the thesis. That is, the reader first needs to understand the relevant situation (young people are overusing their devices) in order to understand the problems that the situation is causing (impaired social skills and mental health).

Looking at your thesis, then, can help you plan out the basic organization for your essay. It can help you to see what information is necessary for supporting your thesis as well as a possible order for presenting that information to your reader. Let’s look at another example:

While today’s advertisements continue to objectify female models, particularly in the clothing and perfume industries, there has also been a noticeable shift since the 1990s in how men and women are represented in ads. Most notably, male models are more frequently sexualized in advertisements than they once were, and they are depicted in the vulnerable, passive roles that were once occupied only by women.

If you were to write a paper using this thesis statement, how would you organize it? What sections of information would your essay need to include to support this thesis, and what order would it make sense to arrange them in?

Consider Common Patterns of Organization

As you plan out the organization of your essay, it can be useful to consider certain patterns of organization that are common in academic writing. We describe several of these patterns below. Keep in mind that they are best used as a way for you to think about the organization that is already emerging in your essay. They can help you to emphasize or expand on a way of ordering your ideas that seems to make sense for your assignment, purpose, and thesis.

Cause-and-Effect

The cause-and-effect pattern is generally used to argue that one or more causes has led to one or more effects or results. Alternatively, you may reverse this sequence to argue that certain effects can be traced back to a particular cause or causes. For example, in the “Consider Your Thesis” section you just read, the sample thesis about cell phone use will likely appear in an essay that follows a cause-and-effect pattern to argue that a particular cause (overuse of cell phones) has led to certain negative effects (impaired social skills and mental health).

Comparison-and-Contrast

Are you trying to define or describe something? Do you need your readers to understand what something is and what it is not? The comparison-and-contrast pattern of organization is particularly useful for developing a definition or showing how a subject is like or unlike another subject. For example, in the “Consider Your Thesis” section, the sample thesis about representations of women and men in advertising will likely appear in an essay that follows a comparison-and-contrast pattern to explain how advertisements today represent their models differently from the advertisements of the 1990s.

Problem-and-Solution

At some point does your essay explore a problem or suggest a solution? The problem-and-solution pattern is commonly used to identify something that’s concerning and to argue for what might be done to remedy the situation. For example, the TED Talk by Adam Alter mentioned before follows a problem-and-solution pattern: Alter first describes how our technology habits negatively affect our moods before providing suggestions for how to make positive changes in our behaviors.

Chronological Organization

Do you need to develop support for an argument by telling a story that can illustrate an important concept for your readers? Do you need to explain the steps in a process or analyze a sequence of events? You can do so by organizing the main ideas of your essay chronologically, as they occur in time. For example, in a research paper, you might explain what other writers have said about your topic by organizing your summary of their contributions chronologically. Alternatively, you might analyze the development of a character or a theme in a work of literature by examining relevant scenes as they appear chronologically in the story.

Spatial Organization

An essay that uses spatial organization discusses the details of a space (or an object, or an image) based on how those details are arranged or encountered. For instance, an essay in your Film Appreciation class might analyze the visual elements of a movie scene in the order that the viewer’s eye is drawn to them on the screen. Alternatively, your Biology lab report might systematically describe a plant or animal specimen from top to bottom, front to back, or outside to inside. As the writer, you create a picture for your reader, and their perspective is the viewpoint from which you describe the subject of your writing.

Order-of-Importance

Many essays organize their main ideas according to their relevance or importance to the thesis. Often, an essay will move from the least to the most important point, in which case the paragraphs are arranged in an effort to build the essay’s strength, gradually persuading a reader with mounting evidence. In other cases, however, it may be necessary to begin with your most important or convincing supporting point, such as in an essay that contains a thesis that is highly debatable. Doing so can captivate your readers and compel them to continue reading.

Summary-and-Response

This “one step back, two steps forward” pattern is common in academic writing because new research usually builds on, critiques, refutes, or otherwise responds to prior research. Because of that, you will complete many writing assignments in college that ask you to first summarize a source (or many sources) before contributing your own insights on the topic. For example, review the hypothetical summary/response essay described in the “Consider Your Purpose” section of this chapter.

Theory-and-Application

Your psychology professor has asked you to use behavioral psychology concepts to explain why test subjects act a certain way during a research study. Your English professor has asked you to interpret the gender dynamics in a novel using feminist literary theory. Your art professor has asked you to write a critique of another student’s portfolio using design principles you have discussed in class. In all of these situations, you are being asked to use a set of ideas (behavioral psychology, feminist theory, design principles) to analyze, interpret, or evaluate a new text or situation (human behavior, a novel, an art portfolio). Essays organized using this pattern generally introduce or explain the relevant theory for the reader before applying it to the text under discussion.

These patterns are just a few ways to organize and develop ideas in your essays. It’s important to note that unless your instructor has explicitly asked you to practice one of them, they will rarely be your starting point when you write. (Few writers sit down and say, “I’m going to write an order-of-importance essay today!”) Rather, they can be a great way to help you understand and emphasize what’s already happening with your thesis or in a draft, to help you to write more, or to help you reorganize some parts of an essay that seem to lack connection or feel disjointed.

Continue Reading: 10.3 Revising Your Organization