In my own writing, I often find that I struggle the most with structure. I think the high school/middle school planning strategy of the “upside-down pyramid” can be helpful at first, but inevitably I come across the issue that I have much more information to share than the pyramid can bare. What is the pyramid for? What is organization for? Well, among other things, to create a scaffold for the building of a clear thesis.
Sante tells his reader up front, in his preface, how he will order his book on page xviii of Low Life by writing that “The book is organized into four sections. The first, “Landscape,” sets forth the lay of the land, the material conditions of housing and the look of the streets. The second, “Sporting Life,” concerns temptation and escapism…Within these sections are chapters, arranged according to broad and relatively obvious categories. These categories pertain to the city’s essential commonplaces…” Sante notes that he has a lot of information to share earlier, and now he describes for us just how he plans to dole out this dearth of material. Then he offers an insight into the symbolism of his structure, offering: “The categories can be seen as corresponding to cards in a Tarot deck of New York City…[or] the archetypal figures in a gambler’s dream book.” And Sante is offering us up the spine of one of his overarching themes: the snare, the lure, and how it runs through Low Life. Note how his major theme relates intrinsically to how he organizes his material.
Maintaining organization is one of the best ways to improve readability, and thus direct communication with your audience, and thus making accessible to the reader your thesis, your main idea. Adding a structure to your ideas is an effective way to maintain organization; a structure that your reader can readily recognize and say to herself: “Okay, first he’s gonna talk about this, then this, then this.”
As a writer, it is worth meditating on the question: “How will I structure this piece of writing? How do I maintain clarity? How do I keep the thesis alive even when I go a bit off-track from the main idea?”
One thing I say to myself as I write is: “Every sentence in this paper is meant to serve the thesis, or main topic, of this paper.” And then I go about asking myself of each sentence: “Is this serving the thesis? The general topic?” A lot of these questions can, and should, be asked in the act of revision (more on revision later). Without further ado, I hereby offer the floor to the class:
What strategies do you use in organizing and maintaining structure in a paper?*
I encourage you to look to what your other classmates (and whoever else choses to answer this question), for pointers, and I hope we may amass something of a list of effective strategies in writing a paper.
*You can comment by clicking “Comments” below.
