presented by Caltech hi I'm shami and I'm Michael and we will be talking to you about organization specifically we're going to talk about big picture organization while Vivian and Edward are going to talk about organization at the paragraph and sentence levels we want to convey to you that organization is important and can look different in various genres and then guide you through a few examples of possible ways to organize now your argument has been determined it is time to arrange your thoughts the goal of writing is to communicate with your audience so it is important
that your writing is easy to follow now I'm sure that you've already learned about organization in high school from English teachers the AP or IB tests and the SATs I think most of us learned how to write in the five paragraph Style with its introduction three by paragraphs and conclusion I even learned that I should arbitrarily arrange those body paragraphs in some kind of manner based on how strong they were that was effective for those standardized essays but that's not always going to apply to writing as these guide books suggest writing should follow a logical
progression not a rigid format and its organization should be tailored for its content we can see this more clearly if we think about writing like solving a math problem what if in math we didn't solve equations logically let's let try this example solve for x x^2 + 1 = 19 - x^2 in your head you're probably solving it along these lines add X2 to both sides subtract one from both sides divide by two and so x = + - 3 now what if instead we wrote X2 + 1 = 19 - x^2 x^2 = 9
2 * X2 = 18 2 * X2 + 1 = 19 and so clearly X = Plus - 3 that seems weird doesn't it the statements are all still there they not make sense in the order in which they are presented would math professor accept this as an acceptable way of solving the problem probably not you can rearrange some of the middle terms from the original order but it' be difficult to understand a solution if it jumped from this step to this one and so on from the short example we can see that your thoughts
should progress logically there can be more than one way to organize them let's explore this idea further with writing just as there is a way of organizing our thoughts in math there are specific ways to organize our thoughts in writing different disciplines can have different forms of organization and even within a field of study individuals can have their own personal tastes depending on the genre you will encounter varying forms of organization it is important to recognize that expected format for specific types of writing for example in your Humanities class you might have to write a
dialectic essay for a philosophy course or an argument driven essay for English or history I still remember the first time I encountered a philosophy essay and I had no idea what I was looking at I had to learn about writing in first person providing a Roat for my readers and keeping them focused with SST and even within the stem field you could be writing a notebook entry a live report or a scientific paper the common form of a paper includes an introduction result section discussion and conclusion but each division of science has its own variation
on that standard you'll also have writing outside of classwork and it'll be helpful to learn the typical organizations of those as well these subjects demonstrate just a bit of the diversity that comes with writing in college so be prepared to learn new organizational methods and techniques lastly let's talk about the first thing that pops into most people's minds when they think about organization outlines although many people advise you to start with an outline you can use one whenever it works best for you you can start with one use one after you've started writing or wait
until the very end and reverse outline to make sure everything works all of these approaches are great you can also feel free to outline in different ways let's look at a few examples of how here's an example of a friend's outline is a list of ideas that she wants to cover in her writing was not organized in a specific manner it can be useful for my friend to briefly sketch out her ideas in this manner she can compare this list to her writing later to see if she covered everything now let's look at the same
outline but more fleshed out there is more detail and the supporting evidence is arranged under the bigger ideas there is a structure present so the writer can follow the outline as she writes nevertheless both of these can be equally useful resources while writing if you wanted even more elaboration in the outline here's some more questions you can think about how are the Big Ideas connected to one another how does the author plan on connecting all of these what is the central argument and how do the sections contribute to it identifying these Transitions and relationships can
help make your outline more effective for your writing process but only if you find it helpful on the other hand an outline can be even more chaotic with more writing and less formatting here we see a free writing outline for an English paper that I recently did at this point I had brainstormed my arguments but I was still figuring out how they fit together this kind of outline can be useful to begin writing or in the process of writing to combine writer's block the same ideas can be reformatted into a pictogram this flowchart clearly delineates
a central claim and its supporting arguments and it explains how different ideas are connected so don't be afraid of outlines and don't feel restricted by outlines we only show you a few examples but you should fig figure out what works best for you outlines exist to ensure that your writing is manageable for you and approachable for a reader all right here's what we want you to take away from this presentation your writing should have a logical progression so that it's easy to follow thoughtful organization lets your reader do less work to understand your writing while
confusing organization requires a reader to reassemble your ideas in hopes of comprehending your thought process think of the two as a poorly built Robo versus a luxury yacht readers will get exhausted while exerting the effort necessary to travel in a leaky radb so they will have less appreciation and enthusiasm for their Journey on the other hand readers in a yacht can legally enjoy the trip wouldn't you prefer your professor's grading on the yacht and not a rowboat having said that keep in mind that there is more than one way to organize and you should feel
free to outline your thoughts in a manner that works best for you thanks for your time for
