Logical Order Is Goal-Driven

There is no such thing as logical order. Instead, there are several different ways of organizing material that may be logical (or not!) in a given situation.

Arrangements of nonfiction information that you and your students will find in print are ...

• Alphabetical order

• Numerical order

• Spatial order

• Chronological order

• Inverted pyramid order

• Emphatic order

What makes organization logical

Four factors determine whether a particular arrangement of information makes sense:

• 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

Let’s look at each of them briefly.

The communicator.

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

The audience.

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

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.

The 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 medium.

It is not reasonable to use an alphabetical arrangement for a memo, for example, or a personal narrative for a research paper any more than it would be reasonable to try to send a picture by radio.

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

You can (and should) expose students to various methods of organizing material so they can chose the logical order most appropriate to the particular paper they are writing.