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Patterns of
Development
in Writing
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Objectives:
● The students should be able to distinguish
different patterns of development in writing.
● The students should be able to use the
different signal words for different patterns
of development in writing.
● The students should be able to write a paper
using a specific pattern of development.
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AGENDA:
01 | Pattern of 02 | Pattern 03 | Pattern
Development: of of
Development: Development:
NARRATION DESCRIPTION CAUSE AND
EFFECT
04 | Pattern 05 | Pattern 06 | Pattern
of of of
Development: Development: Development:
EXEMPLIFICATI DEFINITION COMPARE AND
ON CONTRAST
07 | Pattern of
Development:

CLASSIFICATION
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INTRODUCTION:
● Writing can be more for most students, especially
if they do not know how to write coherently and
cohesively. Sentences and paragraphs must
demonstrate relationships when conveying the
writer's thoughts and ideas about a topic, and this
can be accomplished effectively by employing
patterns of development. In this lesson, we will
examine different development patterns that will
help you produce better academic papers.
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What is Pattern of
Development
● A pattern of development is how an
academic paper is put together from
paragraph to paragraph so that the thesis
and evidence for it are presented in a way
that makes sense and is easy to follow.
● Without a pattern of development, a paper
may be hard to comprehend.
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The Patterns
of
Development
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NARRATION
Is a way to tell a story by putting events in a
logical order. It tells what happened or describes a
chain of events that led to a conclusion or end. It
tells us what happened, where it happened, and when.
Narration is the pattern of development of short
stories, poems, fiction and non-fiction books,
films, and TV and radio programs. When you describe
a narrative from a particular point of view, you are
engaging in the practice of narrating.
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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.
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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 (p. 412).
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EXAMPLE:
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.
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EXAMPLE:
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.
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What the story about:

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.
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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.
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DESCRIPTION (Sensory
•
and Spatial)
means to tell a story in the ordered they occurred
in time.
• main idea, major dates, and events.

SIGNAL WORDS FOR DESCRIPTION:

● Above, Across, adjacent to, over, opposite to, between,
beyond, in front of, inside, under, to the right..
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TYPES OF
DESCRIPTION
● OBJECTIVE AND;
● SUBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION

The focus of an objective description is on the

thing being described, not on the writer's feelings,
thoughts, or personal reactions to it.

Subjective description shows how a writer feels

about the subject and uses more descriptive and
richer language than objective description.
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EXAMPLE: An example from “Serving in Florida” (p. 179), 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
won’t 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.
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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” (p. 979) 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
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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
paralysed 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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CAUSE AND EFFECT

A cause is something that makes an event or

condition happen, and an effect is what happens as
a result. The primary objective of cause-and-
effect in writing is to figure out how different
things are related in terms of their causes and
effects. There are topics that need emphasis on the
questions of "how" and "why," and this is where the
cause and effect pattern may be helpful.
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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 (p. 798).
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.
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CAUSE AND EFFECT

On a similar topic, Terry Tempest Williams in
“The Clan of One-Breasted Women” (p. 816)
proceeds from the effect she sees — the
breast cancer that has affected the women in
her family — to argue that the cause is
environmental.
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CAUSE AND EFFECT

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 don’t 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” (p. 260), 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
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CAUSE AND EFFECT

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” (p. 89), 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:
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CAUSE AND EFFECT

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.
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Explanation:
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.
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EXEMPLIFICATION
Examples are often used in a wide range of
situations. In this pattern, the writer explains the
main idea by giving a long example or a series of
examples that are each very specific.
Exemplification is a way to show or explain what the
rest or whole of something is like. You've probably
noticed that when you read a lesson about a new
topic, watch a documentary, or listen to a classroom
discussion, the best parts are when people give
specific examples to back up their points;
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EXEMPLIFICATION
it's mainly because we tend to understand better
through the aid of examples and illustrations.
Writers use examples a lot in all kinds of writing
to explain and make things clear, add interest, and
persuade.

Exemplification is what a writer does when they use

examples to help prove or clarify a point.
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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”?
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EXEMPLIFICATION
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” (p. 89), Francine Prose establishes the
wide and, she believes, indiscriminate range of readings
assigned in high school classes by giving many examples of
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EXEMPLIFICATION
My own two sons, now twenty-one and seventeen,
have read (in public and private schools)
Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Melville. But they’ve
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
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EXEMPLIFICATION
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.
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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:
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It’s 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:
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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.
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SIGNAL WORDS FOR

EXEMPLIFICATION
●after all
●as an example
●consider the following
●for example
●namely
●for instance
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DEFINITION
• Means to explain what something is.
• Through the use of illustrations,
examples and descriptions.

• SIGNAL WORDS FOR DEFINITION

● is defined as means
● as defined refers to
● to define to illustrate
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DEFINITION
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” (p. 283), 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
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DEFINITION

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
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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.
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COMPARE AND
CONTRAST
• to arrange ideas based on how events are similar
or different from one another.
• SIGNAL WORDS FOR
SIGNAL WORDS FOR COMPARING:
CONTRASTING:
● equally
● likewise • Although
● similarly • And yet
● to compare • Despite
● in the same way • Yet
• whereas
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COMPARE 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 and 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.
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In the following excerpt from “Walking

the Path between Worlds” (p. 300), Lori
Arviso Alvord compares and contrasts
the landscape and culture of her home in
the Southwest with that of New England
and Dartmouth College:
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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 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
contours 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
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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.
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In the first paragraph, Arviso emphasizes the

physical details of the landscape, so her
comparison and contrast relies on description. In
the second paragraph, 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.
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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
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CLASSIFICATION
DIVISION
• means to sort items in order to group together
those with similar characteristics.

SIGNAL WORDS FOR COMPARING:

● another
● another kind
● the last group
● the next part
● classified as
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CLASSIFICATION
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.
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CLASSIFICATION
• DIVISION
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’re 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.”
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• In Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” (p. 542)

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.
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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 thousand-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
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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 didn’t 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.
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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.
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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.
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RECAPITULATION
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THANK YOU!
