ORDER
Logical ordering or arrangement of materials that support an essay’s main idea is valued in the composition process. Indeed, logical ordering or arrangement of ideas is valued in nearly all writing projects assigned in all college disciplines and fields. In the short essay, text is organized around the central theme, in a format that usually consists of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. The body paragraphs support the thesis, which most often appears in the introduction. The conclusion, especially in the short essay, is not a summary paragraph, but one that brings the thesis to closure. A thesis can be stated or implied in the last sentence of the last paragraph, or the conclusion. It is, after all, a conclusion that a writer has drawn based upon the support that she or he presents in the body paragraphs. In the opening or at the end of the essay, a thesis should be supported according to a logical arrangement of ideas, for instance, most important idea to least important, or vice versa. In an essay that attempts to articulate a solution, for instance, a writer must first establish that a problem exists before she or he begins positing solutions. That sense of order occurs at the essay level. At the paragraph level, sentences should be arranged logically, in a recognizable hierarchical order, general to specific, abstract to concrete, or vice versa. At the sentence level, coordinate or subordinate sentence constructions are necessary to logically communicate an idea or ideas.
When you teach students written organization skills, you are teaching more than a pattern or outline for an essay--you are teaching them ways to think critically about their topic. If a student wants to show causes for some people’s infatuation with soap operas, then you will probably show her or him how to create a causal chain that examines each ‘link’ in the chain. You will ask the student to think about each link and its role in the chain. Each link, in turn, must be questioned as a viable link or cause. Thus, the student who writes the clichéd, “people watch soap operas because their own lives are boring” kind of topic sentence might find that boredom is a common human condition or that boredom is a condition for television viewing, if she or he is asked to scrutinize carefully those causes that seem obvious or that are regarded as ‘truths.’ When you tell students that using the coordinating conjunction “and” to link non-coordinate ideas is grammatically incorrect, you are asking them to consider hierarchical structures in their thinking. Students who write “the death penalty is immoral, and it does not deter crime” not only have one too many ideas in their sentence, they cannot assign equal or coordinate status to both ideas. Claims based on morality or on human values are different from claims based upon facts--or lack of facts. The ideas belong in two different sentences. Standard English is equipped with a grammar that fosters the kind of logical thinking that is valued by all members of the academic or college discourse community. Transitional words, for example, used correctly, are not just reader cues--they are writer cues. They tell writers that they have drawn a conclusion or made a comparison. Writers editing their papers should learn to ask themselves if the transitional term or phrase that they employ is logically related to the overall purpose or theme of their paragraph or essay.
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URL: http://www.siue.edu/ENGLISH/Comp_Manual/order.html
Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 13, 2003 by English Web Manager
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