Spatial order schemes
Good looking (and retelling) strategies

Spatial order refers to arbitrary ways of looking at a real or imaginary physical place such as a room, a city, or an atom.

If you were going to discribe the Villa of Palladio shown in the photo above, you'd need some way to make sure you discussed the important features in a logical way that would be easy for readers to follow.

Some logical schemes for examining a place are

• Left to right

• North to south

• West to east/east to west

• Basement to attic

• Top to bottom

• Nearest to farthest

• Outside to inside

Using one of these arbitrary patterns makes the observer look methodically at everything in the space. The idea is that a systematic examination prevents a person from overlooking anything important.

Unfortunately, the organizational pattern doesn't suggest how important each part of the space is. Is the chair at the front of the stage more important to an understanding of the play than the tree painted on the backdrop stage right? A writer cannot answer that question based solely on a front-to-back examination of the stage set.

Essayists often organize a paragraph or a section of a longer nonfiction document in reference to a physical layout, but rarely arrange an entire essay that way. In fact, writers are more likely to use one of the spatial schemes to help them think through their material rather than for presenting it.