Expository writing organization
What's logical arrangement depends on 4 factors

There is no such thing as a logical order for expository writing. Instead, there are several patterns of organization that may be logical in a given situation.

This page will show you what you must teach students to consider when deciding which option to select to organize a piece of nonfiction writing.

What makes nonfiction organization logical

Four factors determine whether a particular arrangement of information makes sense in a specific piece of exposition:

• The writer or speaker who is sending the message.
• The audience the communicator wants to reach with the message.
• The content of the message.
• The medium or communication channel.

As you are teaching students how to write, you need to help them understand that their writing must consider all four communications factors.

Even a brief look at these four factors shows that they interact. Their interaction determines what would be a logical arrangement for a particular communication. You'll see it's no more reasonable to arrange a memo alphabetically, for example, than to try to send a picture by radio.

The communicator's goal

The person who prepares the message has some purpose in mind. English texts tell you the "Big 3" purposes are to inform, persuade, or entertain.

True expository goals, however, are far more specific. They are implied, if not stated, in the writer's thesis statement. The writer's goal has a big impact on how that writer organizes material.

The audience's wishes

Writers who organize their information in ways their readers prefer are more successful than those who do their own thing, ignoring what readers want to see.

Some audiences want material arranged in ways they can easily remember without referring to written documents. Others want a closely reasoned discussion with plenty of detail.

The writer's content

Some material can be organized only one way. For example, if you have to identify the top three candidates for the secretary's job, the only sensible arrangement is numerical order.

On the other hand, numerical order wouldn't be a good way to structure a discussion of the parts of a flower, would it?

The communication medium

Writers need to take into account how people read content in a particular medium. For example, people read only the headlines and first lines the paragraphs of blog posts unless they are extremely interested in the message. That means the topic sentence must be the first sentence of the paragraph.

The most important ways of organizing nonfiction information are inverted pyramid and emphatic order.

You can—and you must—expose students to various methods of organizing their writing so they can choose the logical order most appropriate to the piece they are writing.