PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT IN WRITING

Another way to consider arrangement is according to purpose. Is the writer’s purpose to compare and
contrast, to narrate an event, to define a term? Each of these purposes suggests a method of organization, or
arrangement. These patterns of development include a range of logical ways to organize an entire text or, more
likely, individual paragraphs or sections.
I. NARRATION

Narration refers to telling a story or recounting a series of events. It can be based on personal
experience or on knowledge gained from reading or observation. Chronology usually governs
narration, which includes concrete detail, a point of view, and sometimes such elements as dialogue.
Writers often use narration as a way to enter into their topics. In the following example, Rebecca
Walker tells a story about her son to lead into her explanation of why she put together the anthology
Putting Down the Gun.

The idea for this book was born one night after a grueling conversation with my then eleven-year-old
son. He had come home from his progressive middle school unnaturally quiet and withdrawn,
shrugging off my questions of concern with uncharacteristic irritability. Where was the sunny, chatty
boy I dropped off that morning? What had befallen him in the perilous halls of middle school? I backed
off but kept a close eye on him, watching for clues. After a big bowl of his favorite pasta, he sat on a
sofa in my study and read his science textbook as I wrote at my desk. We both enjoyed this simple yet
profound togetherness, the two of us focused on our own projects yet palpably connected. As we
worked under the soft glow of paper lanterns, with the heat on high and our little dog snoring at his
feet, my son began to relax. I could feel a shift as he began to remember, deep in his body, that he
was home, that he was safe, that he did not have to brace to protect himself from the expectations
of the outside world.
Walker brings her audience into her experience with her son by narrating step-by-step what
happened and what she noticed when he returned from school. It’s not only a personal story but also
one that she will show has wider significance in the culture. Narration has the advantage of drawing
readers in because everyone loves a good story.

II. DESCRIPTION

Description is closely allied with narration because both include many specific details. However,
unlike narration, description emphasizes the senses by painting a picture of how something looks,
sounds, smells, tastes, or feels. Description is often used to establish a mood or atmosphere. Rarely
is an entire essay descriptive, but clear and vivid description can make writing more persuasive. By
asking readers to see what you see and feel what you feel, you make it easy for them to empathize
with you, your subject, or your argument. In the following example from “Serving in Florida,” Barbara
Ehrenreich describes her coworkers:

I make friends, over time, with the other “girls” who work my shift: Nita, the tattooed twenty-
something who taunts us by going around saying brightly, “Have we started making money yet?”
Ellen, whose teenage son cooks on the graveyard shift and who once managed a restaurant in
Massachusetts but will not try out for management here because she prefers being a “common
worker” and not “ordering people around.” Easy-going fiftyish Lucy, with the raucous laugh, who
limps toward the end of the shift because of something that has gone wrong with her leg, the exact
nature of which cannot be determined without health insurance. We talk about the usual girl things
— men, children, and the sinister allure of Jerry’s chocolate peanut-butter cream pie.

Ehrenreich’s primary purpose here is to humanize her coworkers and make her readers
understand their struggle to survive on the minimum wage. To achieve this, she makes them specific
living-and-breathing human beings who are “tattooed” or have a “raucous laugh.”
Narration and description often work hand in hand, as in the following paragraph from
“Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell. The author narrates the death throes of the elephant in
such dense and vivid detail that we mourn the loss and realize that something extraordinary has died,
 and the narrator (Orwell), like all of us, is diminished by that passing — which is the point Orwell
wants us to understand:

When I pulled the trigger, I did not hear the bang or feel the kick — one never does when a shot goes
home — but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short
a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had
come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked
suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed
him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time — it might have been five
seconds, I dare say — he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility
seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again
into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his
feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the
shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of
strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed
beneath him, he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a
tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a
crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

Note the emotionally charged language, such as “devilish roar of glee,” and the strong verbs such
as “slobbered,” “did not collapse but climbed.” Note the descriptive details: “jolt,” “sagging,”
“drooping,” “desperate slowness.” The language is so vivid that we feel as though a drawing or
painting is emerging with each detail the author adds.
One important element used in description is SENSORY IMAGERY. It involves the use of descriptive
language to create mental images by engaging the reader’s five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch,
and smell.

TYPES OF SENSORY IMAGERY

1. Visual Imagery- engages the sense of sight.

Example: The night was black as ever, but bright stars lit up the sky in beautiful and varied
constellations which were sprinkled across the astronomical landscape.
2. Gustatory Imagery – engages the sense of taste
Example: The candy melted in her mouth and swirls of bittersweet chocolate and slightly
sweet but salty caramel blended on her tongue.
Auditory Imagery – engages the sense of hearing
Example: I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind
howling in the grove behind the hall.
3. Tactile Imagery – engages the sense of touch
Example: A gust of cold air blew over her, causing her body to shiver. After she pulled the fuzzy
blanket up to her chin, she was warm and cozy.
4. Olfactory Imagery – engages the sense of smell
Example: He woke up to the smell of burnt toast and greasy bacon, when all he wanted was
coffee.

III. PROCESS ANALYSIS

Process analysis explains how something works, how to do something, or how something was done.
We use process analysis when we explain how to bake bread or set up an Excel spreadsheet, how to
improve a difficult situation or assemble a treadmill. Many self-help books are essentially process
analysis. The key to successful process analysis is clarity: it is important to explain a subject clearly
and logically, with transitions that mark the sequence of major steps, stages, or phases of the
process. In the essay “Transsexual Frogs,” Elizabeth Royte uses process analysis to explain the
research of Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley investigating the
impact of the pesticide atrazine.
 The next summer Hayes headed into the field. He loaded a refrigerated 18- wheel truck with 500 half-
gallon buckets and drove east, followed by his students. He parked near an Indiana farm, a Wyoming
river, and a Utah pond, filled his buckets with 18,000 pounds of water, and then turned his rig back
toward Berkeley. He thawed the frozen water, poured it into hundreds of individual tanks, and
dropped in thousands of leopard-frog eggs collected en route. To find out if frogs in the wild showed
hermaphroditism, Hayes dissected juveniles from numerous sites. To see if frogs were vulnerable as
adults, and if the effects were reversible, he exposed them to atrazine at different stages of their
development.

In this example, Royte explains how something was done, that is, the actual physical journey that
Hayes took when he “headed into the field”: he traveled from California to Indiana, Wyoming, Utah,
and back to California. The verbs themselves emphasize the process of his work: he “loaded,”
“parked,” “filled,” “turned . . . back,” “thawed,” “poured,” and “dropped.”

IV. EXEMPLIFICATION

Providing a series of examples — facts, specific cases, or instances — turns a general idea into a
concrete one; this makes your argument both clearer and more persuasive to a reader. A writer
might use one extended example or a series of related ones to illustrate a point. You’re probably
familiar with this type of development. How many times have you tried to explain something by
saying, “Let me give you an example”?
Aristotle taught that examples are a type of logical proof called induction. That is, a series of
specific examples leads to a general conclusion. If you believe, for example, that hip-hop culture has
gone mainstream, you might cite a series of examples that leads to that conclusion. For example, you
could discuss hip-hop music in chain-store advertising, the language of hip-hop gaining widespread
acceptance, and entertainers from many different backgrounds integrating elements of hip-hop into
their music. In the following paragraph from “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” Francine
Prose establishes the wide and, she believes, indiscriminate range of readings assigned in high school
classes by giving many examples of those her own sons have read:

My own two sons, now twenty-one and seventeen, have read (in public and private schools)
Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Melville. But they have also slogged repeatedly through the
manipulative melodramas of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, through sentimental middlebrow
favorites (To Kill a Mockingbird and A Separate Peace), the weaker novels of John Steinbeck, the
fantasies of Ray Bradbury. My older son spent the first several weeks of sophomore English discussing
the class’s summer assignment, Ordinary People, a weeper, and former bestseller by Judith Guest
about a “dysfunctional” family recovering from a teenage son’s suicide.

Prose develops her point by giving examples of authors, novels, and types of novels. But only in
the case of Ordinary People does she discuss the example. The others are there to support her point
about the rather random nature of books assigned in high school classrooms.
In the following paragraph, instead of giving several examples, Prose uses one extended example
to make the point that even so-called great literature is often poorly taught. Note how she mines the
example of Huckleberry Finn to discuss the various objections and concerns she has about teaching:

It is cheering that so many lists include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — but not when we
discover that this moving, funny novel is being taught not as a work of art but as a piece of damning
evidence against that bigot, Mark Twain. A friend’s daughter’s English teacher informed a group of
parents that the only reason to study Huckleberry Finn was to decide whether it was a racist text.
Instructors consulting Teaching Values Through Teaching Literature will have resolved this debate
long before they walk into the classroom to supervise “a close reading of Huckleberry Finn that will
reveal the various ways in which Twain undercuts Jim’s humanity: in the minstrel routines with Huck
as the ‘straight man;’ in generalities about Blacks as unreliable, primitive and slow-witted. . ..”
 By examining one case in depth — Huckleberry Finn — Prose considers the novel itself, ways it is
taught, and the suggestions in one book of how to teach it. Note that she might have brought in other
examples, treating each briefly, but focusing on one book allows her to examine the issue more
closely.

V. COMPARISON AND CONTRAST

A common pattern of development is comparison and contrast: juxtaposing two things to highlight
their similarities and differences. Writers use comparison and contrast to analyze information
carefully, which often reveals insights into the nature of the information being analyzed.
Comparison/contrast is often required on examinations where you have to discuss the subtle
differences or similarities in the method, style, or purpose of two texts. In the following excerpt from
“Walking the Path between Worlds”, Lori Arviso Alvord compares and contrasts the landscape and
culture of her home in the Southwest with that of New England and Dartmouth College:

My memories of my arrival in Hanover, New Hampshire, are mostly of the color green. Green
cloaked the hillsides, crawled up the ivied walls, and was reflected in the river where the Dartmouth
crew students sculled. For ARRANGEMENT 34701 01 001-034 SHEA r6jk.ps 3/30/07 3:35 PM Page 21
a girl who had never been far from Crownpoint, New Mexico, the green felt incredibly juicy, lush,
beautiful, and threatening. Crownpoint had had vast acreage of sky and sand, but aside from the
pastel scrub brush, mesquite, and chamiso, practically the only growing things there were the tiny
stunted pines called pinion trees. Yet it is beautiful; you can see the edges and con tours of red earth
stretching all the way to the boxshaped faraway cliffs and the horizon. No horizon was in sight in
Hanover, only trees. I felt claustrophobic.

If the physical contrasts were striking, the cultural ones were even more so. Although I felt
lucky to be there, I was in complete culture shock. I thought people talked too much, laughed too
loud, asked too many personal questions, and had no respect for privacy. They seemed overly
competitive and put a higher value on material wealth than I was used to. Navajos placed much more
emphasis on a person’s relations to family, clan, tribe, and the other inhabitants of the earth, both
human and nonhuman, than on possessions. Everyone at home followed unwritten codes for
behavior. We were taught to be humble and not to draw attention to ourselves, to favor cooperation
over competition (so as not to make ourselves “look better” at another’s expense or hurt someone’s
feelings), to value silence over words, to respect our elders, and to reserve our opinions until they
were asked for.

In the first paragraph, Arviso emphasizes the physical details of the landscape, so her
comparison/contrast relies on description. In the second para graph, she is more analytical as she
examines the behavior. Although she does not make a judgment directly, in both paragraphs she
leads her readers to understand her conclusion that her New Mexico home — the landscape and its
inhabitants — is what she prefers.

Comparisons and contrasts, whether as a full essay or a paragraph, can be organized in two ways:
subject-by-subject or point-by-point. In a subject-by-subject analysis, the writer discusses all
elements of one subject, then turns to another. For instance, a comparison and contrast of two
presidential candidates by subject would present a full discussion of the first candidate, then the
second candidate. A point-by-point analysis is organized around the specific points of a discussion.
So, a point-by-point analysis of two presidential candidates might discuss their education, then their
experience, then the vision each has for the country. Arviso uses point-by-point analysis as she first
compares and contrasts the landscapes and then the cultures of both places.
 VI. CLASSIFICATION AND DIVISION

It is important for readers as well as writers to be able to sort material or ideas into major
categories. By answering the question, “What goes together and why?” Writers and readers can
make connections between things that might otherwise seem unrelated. In some cases, the
categories are ready-made, such as single, married, divorced, or widowed. In other cases, you might
be asked either to analyze an essay that offers categories or to apply them. For instance, you might
classify the books you are reading in class according to the categories Francis Bacon defined: “Some
books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Most of the time, a writer’s task is to develop his or her own categories, to find a distinctive way
of breaking down a larger idea or concept into parts. For example, in “Politics and the English
Language,” George Orwell sets up categories of imprecise and stale writing: “dying metaphors,”
“operators of verbal false limbs,” “pretentious diction,” and “meaningless words.” He explains each
in a paragraph with several examples and analysis. Classification and division is not the organization
for his entire essay, however, because he is making a larger cause and-effect argument that sloppy
language leads to sloppy thinking; nevertheless, his classification scheme allows him to explore in a
systematic way what he sees as problems.
In Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” she classifies the “Englishes” she speaks into categories of
public and private spheres:

Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a
large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of
the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well
enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother
was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the
kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like “The intersection of memory upon
imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that related to thus-and-thus” — speech filled with
carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized
forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in
school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.

Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself
conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of
new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.” My husband was
with us as well, and he did not notice any switch in my Englishes. And then I realized why. It’s because
over the twenty years we’ve been together I’ve often used that same kind of English with him, and
sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English
that related to family talk, the language I grew up with.

Tan does not start out by identifying two categories, but as she describes them, she classifies her
“Englishes” as the English she learned in school and in books and the language of intimacy she learned
at home.

VII. DEFINITION
So many discussions depend upon definition. In examining the benefits of attending an Ivy League
school, for instance, we need to define Ivy League before we can have a meaningful conversation. If we are
evaluating a program’s success, we must define what qualifies as success. Before we can determine whether
certain behavior is or is not patriotic, we must define the term. Ratings systems for movies must carefully define
violence. To ensure that writers and their audiences are speaking the same language, definition may lay the
foundation to establish common ground or identifying areas of conflict.

Defining a term is often the first step in a debate or disagreement. In some cases, definition is only a
paragraph or two that clarify terms, but in other cases, the purpose of an entire essay is to establish a definition.
In Jane Howard’s essay “In Search of the Good Family,” she explores the meaning of family, a common enough
term, yet one she redefines. She opens by identifying similar terms: “Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe,
call it a family.” She contrasts the traditional “blood family” with “new families... that consist of friends of the
road, ascribed by chance, or friends of the heart, achieved by choice.” She develops her essay by first
establishing the need we all have for a network of “kin” who may or may not be blood relatives. Then she
analyzes ten characteristics that define a family. Here is one:

Good families prize their rituals. Nothing welds a family more than these. Rituals are vital
especially for clans without histories because they evoke a past, imply a future, and hint at continuity.
No line in the seder service at Passover reassures more than the last: “Next year in Jerusalem!” A clan
becomes more of a clan each time it gathers to observe a fixed ritual (Christmas, birthdays,
Thanksgiving, and so on), grieves at a funeral (anyone may come to most funerals; those who do
declare their tribalness), and devises a new rite of its own. Equinox breakfasts can be at least as
welding as Memorial Day parades. Several of my colleagues and I used to meet for lunch every Pearl
Harbor Day, preferably to eat some politically neutral fare like smorgasbord, to “forgive” our only
ancestrally Japanese friend, Irene Kubota Neves. For that and other things we became, and remain, a
sort of family.

Howard explains the purpose of rituals in her opening paragraph and then provides specific examples to
explain what she means by rituals. She offers such a variety of them that her readers cannot fail to understand
the flexibility and openness she associates with her definition of family.

VIII. CAUSE AND EFFECT

Analyzing the causes that lead to a certain effect or, conversely, the effects that result from a
cause is a powerful foundation for argument. Rachel Carson’s case for the unintended and
unexpected effects of the pesticide DDT in Silent Spring is legendary. Although she uses a number of
different methods to organize and develop her analysis, this simple — or not so simple — causal link
is the basis of everything that follows. On a similar topic, Terry Tempest Williams in “The Clan of One-
Breasted Women” proceeds from the effect she sees — the breast cancer that has affected the
women in her family — to argue that the cause is environmental.
Since causal analysis depends upon crystal clear logic, it is important to carefully trace a chain of
cause and effect and to recognize possible contributing causes. You do not want to jump to the
conclusion that there is only one cause or one result, nor do you want to mistake an effect for an
underlying cause. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. points out
that his critics had mistaken a cause for an effect: the protests of the civil rights movement were not
the cause of violence but the effect of segregation.
Cause and effect is often signaled by a why in the title or the opening paragraph. In “I Know Why
the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” Francine Prose sets out what she believes are the causes for high
school students’ lack of enthusiasm for reading: “Given the dreariness with which literature is taught
in many American classrooms, it seems miraculous that any sentient teenager would view reading as
a source of pleasure.” In the following paragraph, she explains the positive effects of reading classical
literature:
Great novels can help us master the all-too-rare skill of tolerating — of being able to hold in
mind — ambiguity and contradiction. Jay Gatsby has a shady past, but he’s also sympathetic. Huck
Finn is a liar, but we come to love him. A friend’s student once wrote that Alice Munro’s characters
weren’t people, he’d choose to hang out with but that reading her work always made him feel “a little
less petty and judgmental.” Such benefits are denied to the young reader exposed only to books with
banal, simple-minded moral equations as well as to the students encouraged to come up with
reductive, wrong-headed readings of multilayered texts.

In her analysis, Prose argues for the positive effects of reading canonical literature, and she
provides several examples. She concludes by pointing out that teaching less challenging works, or
teaching more challenging works without acknowledging their complexity, has the effect of
encouraging unclear or superficial thinking
PROPERTIES OF A WELL-WRITTEN TEXT
A text is well-written if it has the four properties: paragraph organization, coherence and cohesion, language
use, and mechanics. It is very important to pay attention to these details.

1. ORGANIZATION

Organization as a property of a well-written text refers on how the ideas in the text are organized or how
the paragraph is arranged with its introduction, body, and conclusion. It must also have the topic
sentence or the main idea. Here are the techniques on how to organize a paragraph so that it will become
a well-written text.

a. Sequential Order. It is a technique in arranging the text observing the chronological order or time,
process or sequence, and narration of events by using signal words like first, second, third, initially,
primarily, following, preceding, next, when, later, before, after, then, until, not long after that, finally,
lastly, at last, etc.
b. Spatial Order. This is another technique in organizing the paragraph pertaining to space, position, or
location of people or things by using signal words like above, below, under, behind, beside, beyond,
alongside, nearby, in front of, inside, outside, on top of, etc. This is very suitable when describing
about the geographical location of things or people.
c. Complexity Order. This technique in organizing compositions refers to the logical order from simple
to complex, inductive to deductive, cause and effect, and problem and solution to help the writers
explain their ideas. This can also be done by defining and illustrating. For cause-effect, you can use
signal words like for, because, since, as a consequence, due to, etc. Signal words like because, as a
solution, consequently, so that, therefore, etc. can be used for problem-solution. When defining,
transitional devices such as is defined as, means, refers to, to illustrate, as defined, etc. can be used.
d. Listing Order. It means the ordering of ideas following the alphabet (from A to Z). Examples of
alphabetical order are the major cities in the Philippines presented in an article: Cagayan De Oro City,
Caloocan, Cebu, Davao City, Manila, Parañaque, Pasig, Quezon City, Taguig, and Zamboanga City.
This can also be done by enumerating ideas through numbers in ascending order (e.g.
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, etc.) and descending order (e.g. 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2, and 1).

2. COHERENCE AND COHESION

Coherence is defined as the quality of being logical, consistent, and able to be understood.
Cohesion on the other hand refers to the act of forming a whole unit. It is effectively a subset of
coherence.

Imagine coherence as a building then, picture cohesion as the bricks and cement which make up
the building. Bricks and cement can be put together to create any form of structure. However, it is only
when they are laid together properly that they form a building. Similarly, a text will be cohesive if
cohesive ties are used, however it will only be coherent if the cohesive ties are used appropriately to
create meaning. You can have cohesion without coherence but you cannot have coherence without
cohesion. The picture does not make sense unless the correct pieces are placed in the correct order,
even if certain pieces may be the same size and shape.

Coherence is very helpful when jumping ideas so that they will stick to each other. This can be achieved
by applying techniques such as: using topic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph; placing major
ideas in another paragraph and sequencing the ideas in logical order or by numbering.
 Cohesion is a property of a well-written text that helps the ideas to become meaningful by sticking the
ideas together at the sentence level. This can be achieved by using transitional devices, pronouns,
subordinators and coordinators, and lexical patterning.

3. LANGUAGE STYLE

It is the form of language that the writer used that are usually measured among a formal-informal scale.
The styles of language are used differently depending on the context in terms of subject matter,
audience/readers, the mode of discourse (speaking or writing ) , and the formality of the occasion or
situation.

4. MECHANICS

It refers to the rules of the written language, such as capitalization, punctuation and spelling. An
understanding of both grammar and mechanics is required to clearly communicate your ideas in a paper.