3.5  Guidelines for Organizing Your Writing

You should decide how to organize the writing before you write it. Let's take a moment to review the three types of organizing patterns.

Three prompts follow, along with three organizing patterns you saw in the Focus & Meaning section of the Guide and also reviewed in section 3.4 of the Writer's Guide. Match up purposes and patterns with the requirements of each prompt or task.

Prompt 1:

Your school budget has to be cut by $100,000. Write a letter to the principal recommending what, in your view, should be cut from the budget.

Purpose:

_____________________

Pattern you would use:

_____________________

Click here for suggested response.

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Prompt 2:

If you could improve your skill or ability at three sports or recreational activities, what would they be?

Purpose:

_____________________

Pattern you would use:

_____________________

Click here for suggested response.

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Prompt 3:

You've probably heard the expression, A friend in need is a friend indeed. In other words, a real friend is there to help when the person really needs the help. Tell about a time when you were a real friend to someone in need.

Purpose:

_____________________

Pattern you would use:

_____________________

Click here for suggested response.

Selecting Organizing Pattern based on the Purpose of the Writing

An important guideline ABOUT ORGANIZATION: Your decision about organizing pattern should be based on the purpose of the writing.

• If your purpose is persuasive, you should choose a persuasive pattern to organization your essay's response
.

Prompt 1 has a persuasive purpose, to convince the principal, so a persuasive pattern is selected.

Your school budget has to be cut by $100,000. Write a letter to the principal recommending what, in your view, should be cut from the budget.

If your purpose is to tell about what happened use a narrative pattern to tell the sequence of events.

Prompt 2, which calls only for information and not argument, can be organized with an informational pattern.

If you could improve your skill or ability at three sports or recreational activities, what would they be?

If your purpose calls for a sequence of events or calls for you to tell what happened, you should choose a narrative pattern.

Prompt 3 has a narrative pattern chosen because the prompt requires a story to be told.

You've probably heard the expression, friend in need is a friend indeed. In other words, a real friend is there to help when the person really needs the help. Tell about a time when you were a real friend to someone in need.

You should plan the beginning and middle after you plan the end.

This rule might not look right to you. How can you plan the end before you write the beginning and the middle? Wait a minute. The rule doesn't say to write the end first; the rule says to plan the end first. How would this work with our three prompts?

We'll need to look at the three pattern outlines as we do this. One sentence will be written for each pattern part so you can see how ideas connect.

Prompt 1: Opinion-Reason Pattern

Prompt 2: Topic-Aspect Pattern

Prompt 3: Narrative Pattern

Pattern Suits the Purpose

What pattern should you use for a note? The answer, of course, depends on the purpose of the note. You could write a note to give information, tell a story, try to solve a problem, explain how to do something, or create an imaginative story or poem. The name of a note, a report, a letter, a paper, an often tells little about its purpose.

When you are writing in response to a prompt or task or question, do your analysis and discover the purpose of your writing. Then you can choose a pattern that will get the job done. Here are the patterns we have been using, with a typical purpose and example for each.

Organizing Pattern:    Purpose: topic-aspect: tell about a subject (what I learned on the field trip) how-to: tell how to do something (how to raise your math grade) opinion-reason: tell what should be done (stop smoking now!) thesis-proof: tell the importance or significance of something (some diets are dangerous) narrative: tell what happened (our bus broke down on the expressway)

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