74 Arranging Paragraphs

The genre you’re writing in will likely be the most important determining factor in deciding when to paragraph or where to place your paragraphs. For example, the organizing principles for an argumentative essay based on research and citation of multiple sources will require you to think about where you’ll place the paragraphs that make the strongest points, whereas an analysis essay may require a spatial or appeals-based organization that guides the reader through various elements within a written, oral, visual, or electronic artifact. In this section, we’ll discuss different theories guiding writers’ arrangement of paragraphs.

Primacy vs. Recency

To elaborate on the organization of argumentative, research-based essays, some writers tend to think in terms of primacy versus recency. When a writer steps back to look at the many paragraphs they wrote, they might rearrange paragraphs to place their strongest points in strategic locations. When organizing with primacy in mind, a writer might place paragraphs featuring their strongest claims and evidence early on in the piece to persuade readers from the start. With primacy, the writer strategically chooses if they want their reader to encounter persuasive information immediately so that they read the rest of the essay in agreement with the author. When a writer arranges the paragraphs to build toward or end with their strongest paragraphs toward the end, then the writer is organizing with recency in mind. Arranging paragraphs to end with the most persuasive information can help to win over a skeptical audience needing more information to be built into the body of a text before deciding if they’ll agree with the author.

Chronological

Of course, some texts lend well to chronological organizations. If you’re writing an essay that will contain many dates or pertinent historical events, then a chronological organization enables you to arrange paragraphs in accordance with a historical timeline. For analyses, a chronological order sometimes works to support the writer and reader in moving carefully, one-by-one through the placement of features of a text to be analyzed. For narrative essays, a chronological organization can feel like an easy go-to method for developing your organization. However, take special caution to avoid giving a simplified plot summary for narrative essays, and consider structuring a narrative essay out-of-order or in a non-linear fashion much like thriller movies do to keep the audience interested and piecing together what happens next.

Spatial

A spatial organization can be incredibly helpful for arranging paragraphs in analysis papers, particularly those that are geared more toward visual rhetorical analysis. Spatial relates to the word space, and when conducting a spatial analysis, you might think about how the eye moves across the space of a text. For example, when we naturally analyze, our eyes tend to look for focal points, centering objects, or the directions lines create. When we start by analyzing what we see first, next, and so on, we take the reader with us as we visually break down numerous elements of a text.

Imagine you’re looking at a painting of a fruit bowl in a museum, and there’s a gigantic pineapple sitting in the center of all the other fruits. As opposed to a chronological organization, which moves in a left-to-right linear order, a spatial organization might start in the center of a picture because the largest element is anchored there. After analyzing the color, texture, and stylistic features of the pineapple, you would move not to the element right next to it but to the next element in the painting that catches your eye. Maybe you notice a corner window shining light onto the bowl. That would be the next element to write a paragraph of analysis on in your spatial organization.

Appeals-based 

In Chapter 4 or 5, more information on the persuasive appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos is provided, and these appeals might be useful to you in organizing an analysis focused on rhetorical appeals. You might consider choosing one of these appeals to develop an argument about how that particular appeal can be used to understand the rhetorical purpose of a text. On the other hand, some students favor speaking to each of the appeals by giving a paragraph or more to each one. If you go this route, be sure to actively contemplate if you want to touch on each of the three appeals in order to form a 5PE or if your instructor would like to see you write beyond a 5PE.