79 Wrapping Up

In this chapter, we began with the concept and purpose of organically structured essays, which stands in stark contrast to the standardized, familiar 5PE approach that writers most often come to know in high school writing classrooms. When aiming for the organically structured essay approach, it’s important to think about paragraphs as units of text that can be structured and arranged to increase clarity and cohesion for the reader, which is why this chapter focused on how to effectively build, structure, and arrange paragraphs. The differences between body paragraphs versus introduction or conclusion paragraphs were also explored, and the final section touched on ideas for achieving flow in one’s organization.

It’s worth acknowledging that managing the various parts of organization can feel like a juggling act, and most of us don’t know how to juggle (not well anyway). Rather than thinking about all you must be consciously tending to in order to improve your essay’s organization, you might focus more on how your mind subconsciously tends to many of these organizational elements. Composition studies scholar Ann Berthoff once compared the great balancing act that is writing to learning how to ski:

Let me speak from my experience as a profoundly unathletic person . . . [My ski instructor’s instruction was to do thus and do so with my knees, to hold my arms this way and not that way, etc.] All that happened was that I continually pitched forward and fell in the snow. But suddenly across the meadows, I saw a figure going like the wind—a young man in shorts and a tee shirt, obviously a serious skier! And as I watched I suddenly saw the whole shape of the act of skiing; I saw the Gestalt; I got the rhythm, the allatonceness of the action. I did what I saw and I shot across the snow! What I needed was not a model which could show me how the various gestures and stances and operations fitted together, but an image of how cross-country skiing looks, and kinesthetically, how it feels. The image of the skier gave me the whole process; it represented the allatonceness of cross-country skiing. (89)

Though model papers (also known as mentor texts) can be helpful at times, Berthoff is suggesting that sometimes we need to stop and study how others are writing before launching confidently into our own process of organizing a piece. Look for opportunities to study models, to talk to other students in your class about how they’re organizing their papers, or even to ask your instructor questions about their writing process sometimes. Instructors are often happy to pull back the curtain on organizational techniques that work for them, but you may not know until you ask.