Organization

Organization is one of the most important aspects of your paper. It can take great ideas and make them powerful or reduce them to worthless bits of trivia. But don’t get too anxious to get to work on it, it’s easier if you’ve done another step or two first.

Before you start figuring out your paper’s organization, you should have your purpose very clearly defined in your mind. Once you know that, make sure you’ve got something to organize. If you’ll spend some time brainstorming or freewriting up some ideas, your organizing efforts will go much more quickly.

Once you know your purpose and have some content, you’re ready to plan your organization. In choosing an organization, you want to plan for two things:

Keep your ideas flowing smoothly with logical transitions
Consider how your audience will react to each idea

Many people find outlines to be very helpful at this stage. Outlines force you to identify your main ideas. Once you have those, you will find numerous possibly logical organizations for them. It may help to consider each idea as a set or a subset. You may then begin with the smallest subset and build up to the big picture or vice versa.

Sometimes your audience does not agree with some of your ideas. Rather than make them uncooperative readers, you may wish to prepare them for these ideas. Some ideas for this are:

Begin your paper stating that you will investigate an issue rather than prove one side of it.
Explain the views of the opposing side (your audience’s views) in a better light than they could. This makes them feel understood and leaves them willing to consider your views.
Start out with interesting non-controversial ideas.
Use quotations to express the controversial ideas, keeping your ethos safe.

Of course you should always keep any promises you make in the beginning of your paper. Apparent manipulation destroys your ethos.

If you have already written a draft of your paper and are not sure about its organization, adding headings can help. Again, this forces you to identify main points. It also helps to eliminate or reorganize information that does not fit a certain section. If you have information—even one sentence—that does not fit the section it’s in, take it out! Find or create the right spot. Chances are you’ve already said it somewhere else already, anyway.

Don’t let yourself get too attached to the first way your paper comes out. Rearranging your organization is one of the easiest and most effective ways to revise.

Main Index | Multi-Genre | Persuasive