SECTION Three -- Organizing Papers: Types of Order

Looked at from the outside, the structure of a successful piece of writing seems inevitable: This is the way it should be; this is the way it had to be. We speak of the organization of a good article or essay as if what appears on the page represents the only possible arrangement of the con tent. When you’re writing, however, and particularly when you’re prewriting, the process of organizing is scarcely more than an attempt to piece together a collection of facts and a jumble of ideas. Even in your early drafts you may still be searching for order, trying to make out patterns in your material and working to bring the particulars of your subject into line with what is still only a half-formed notion of purpose.

In your search for order you should be guided primarily by two considerations — what you’ve thought out, and found out, about your subject and what you want to say about your subject to the particular audience you’re addressing. The structure you settle on is likely to be the result of reconciling the demands of your material, your purpose in writing about it, and the needs and interests of your readers. As you write and rewrite, you’ll compress here and expand there, possibly changing the order of major blocks of material. Such shifts are a natural part of the writing process because for the writer, unlike the reader, no structure is inevitable. What the writer wants to do is settle on a structure that will strike the reader as the right one.

Types of Order

There are two basic types of order for material: chronological or spatial order, which to some degree reflects or adapts an order in time or space that the writer perceives in the material; and logical order, which represents a pattern that the writer Invents and imposes on the material. Even chronological or spatial order is imposed, of course, in the sense that the writer must first recognize the existence of that order and then represent it. In the process of representing it, he almost always modifies it in some way.

A third type of order, associational, is highly personal. The subject, or some phase of it, reminds the writer of something, which he associates with something else, and so on.

Chronological or Spatial Order

Whenever you give a physical description of your subject or treat it in a chronological framework, the structure of your paper is rooted in the space order or time order of the material. For some purposes, you’ll reproduce that arrangement as accurately as you can. For others, you’ll alter it. Even when your prime obligation is to make an accurate report, you have some options. You can choose a space order and then proceed systematically from left to right, top to bottom, inside to outside, suburbs to city center, and so on. Or you may decide that you can give a clearer, more unified account by using a time order based on the sequence of your own observation—first, perhaps, the major features, visible from a distance, then successively smaller details as you (and your readers) come closer to the subject. In yet another adaptation of spatial order, you might first single out the most striking feature (not necessarily the largest) and from there move backward or forward, up or down, right or left.

Whenever you use description to support a thesis, the order you give your visual impressions will be strongly influenced by what that thesis is. Think of the different ways you might describe registration day, depending on whether the impression you want to get across is purposeful activity or aimless confusion. In either case, if your intention is to produce a factual account, the spatial arrangements you indicate in your paper should be recognizable to anyone who looks at the same scene. He should be able to see what you saw, even though he might interpret it in a different way. The college registrar may see the long lines on registration day as gratifying design. Your impression may be quite different.

For any material presented in a time sequence—an account of a process, a summary of a plot, a personal narrative — the typical movement is chronological (raw material to product, opening to closing, 1970 to 1977). But again you can modify the actual sequence in various ways. You can describe the finished product before giving the instructions for making it. You can begin with the climax of a plot and then work backward and forward from it. You can start with the concluding episode of a personal narrative and use flashbacks to fill in the action. Whatever the modifications, the order should make sense, and the reader should be able to reconstruct the actual order of events.

And whether or not you spell out your point of view, it should be consistent. Organizational weaknesses in descriptive and narrative papers can often be traced to a physical point of view that falters or shifts unaccountably or to a psychological point of view that’s confused or unclear. If, in describing the scene on registration day, for example, you abruptly changed your physical point of view from that of an observer on the sidelines to that of a student enduring the long delays—or if you changed your psychological point of view from that of objective reporter to that of disgusted critic — the organization of your paper would be weakened. When such shifts occur, the reader simply can’t tell where you stand, literally or figuratively, in respect to the subject.

Logical Order

Except when it clearly lends itself to space order (as in physical description) or to time order (as in narration), a subject seldom suggests and scarcely ever requires a definite order of discussion. There’s no necessary order, for instance, in a criticism of a movie or an argument about sexist language or an analysis of the problem of adjusting to college life. The structure of any paper that explains an idea or presents an argument is an outgrowth of the writer’s purpose and his estimate of the rhetorical situation — what aspects of the subject to discuss, in what order, and with what emphasis. The structure is good if it makes the writer’s ideas and convictions about the subject clear and sensible to his audience.

Any order other than time order, space order, and as sociational order may be called logical.’ Logical order covers a great variety of organizational patterns. You may set your readers straight on some matter by showing how wrongheaded other ideas about the subject are.

You may examine the many particulars of a subject in order to arrive at a generalization about it. You may list and support six reasons for holding a conviction, ordering them from weak to strong or from strong to weak or from middling strong to strongest. You may explore three pro posed courses of action, demonstrating that one isn’t feasible, that another is feasible but not desirable, and that the third is both feasible and desirable. You may make a systematic investigation into what the subject is like and unlike, what caused it, what effects it has, and perhaps what good it is.

There are other possibilities, more than can be listed here. Whatever the structure, the good paper has direction and destination. The thought moves. It gets somewhere. Sound logical order reveals the relation among clusters of details or between ideas and carries a reader smoothly from one stage of the discussion to another. Faulty order makes a reader puzzle over the relation of, say, the sixth paragraph to the fifth and makes him wonder why a topic is treated here, not there—or why it’s treated at all.

Though many variations occur, the skeleton organization of an expository paper is likely to follow one of three basic schemes. In the support structure the paper develops from the central idea—an assertion, a generalization, a thesis. In the discovery structure the paper develops toward a generalization, a thesis, a solution. In a pro-and- con, or exploratory, structure the writer investigates the subject by weighing its strengths and weaknesses or by looking at it from different points of view; the conclusion he arrives at often represents the correction, qualification, or refinement of the generalization or hypothesis with which he began.

Support Structure. Early in a paper that follows the sup port plan, the writer advances the idea or cluster of ideas that he intends to analyze or defend or attack. This paragraph from a text book forecasts the topics that will receive detailed discussion in the succeeding pages, discussion that will substantiate the generalizations that open and close the paragraph:

Americans in the years following the Civil War—a time which has become known as the Gilded Age — lived in a nation quite different from that of their fathers. It had become a nation where traditional ideas of democracy were modified by the values of a new industrial and urban society. The most important single change was the rise of industrial capitalism and the burgeoning of corporations that controlled nationwide industries. But American life was altered by other far-reaching developments: settlement of the last American West, construction of the transcontinental railroads, revolutionary change in agriculture, urban growth with all its attendant problems, the rise of the labor movement, a huge influx of immigrants, and the emergence of the United States as a world power. These developments gave the period its dramatic character and its importance in our history. They also established the foundations of modem America. — Vincent P. De Santis in Carl N. Degler et al., The Democratic Experience

The opening paragraph reprinted below is equally in formative. A commonly accepted generalization has been tested, and the investigation has shown that the generalization is true for one group but not for another.

One would suppose, in view of all the household appliances that have been introduced over the past 50 years, that American women must spend considerably less time in housework now than their mothers and grandmothers did in the 1920’s. I have investigated the matter and found that the generalization is not altogether true. Nonemployed women, meaning women who are not in the labor force, in fact devote as much time to housework as their forebears did. The expectation of spending less time in housework applies only to employed women.—Joann Vanek, Scientific American

In writing a paper on the support pattern, you can follow your initial statement with roughly equal blocks of material (single paragraphs or paragraph sequences), each developing an aspect of your lead-off idea. Or you can narrow your opening assertion to a particular application (a general opinion about school busing followed by an ac count of your own experiences when you were being bused to school) and then conclude with a recommendation for action in a current case. Or you may state your opinion, drop immediately to the most specific aspect of the subject, and then build back to your generalization, now giving it more decisive statement.

Discovery Structure. The typical procedure for a paper on the support pattern is analytic: the writer slices or divides his opening block of material. In the discovery pat tern the procedure is synthetic: the writer pulls together, gathers up, as he builds toward his thesis. Again, there are many variations. You can begin with a particular aspect of the subject, move to a related aspect, then to another and yet another, unfolding your ideas step by step. You can start your paper small and end broad, in inverted pyramid fashion. ( You might open a discussion of a campus-wide or statewide or nationwide issue with an account of a single incident that you saw or took part in.) Or you can start small, move to a generalization, and go on to a new particular that can be inferred from it. ( You might begin with one aspect of your elementary-school education, move to a generalization about elementary-school teaching, and then relate that generalization to some habits and attitudes of yours that persist now that you’re in college.)

One common application of the discovery pattern is the problem-solution (or question-answer) structure. The occasion for the paper lies in a problem that needs solving, an issue that needs settling, a happening or situation that needs explaining. The paper comes to a close when the solution has been offered, the course of action shown to be wise or unwise, the happening or situation explained. In such a paper you may move directly from your analysis of the problem to your solution, or you may explore alternative proposals, showing them to be inadequate and all the while piling up evidence for the solution you’re going to propose. Though the content of papers that follow this pat tern may be complex, the bare structure can often be reduced to some such simple formula as:

To solve X, we need to take steps A, B, and C.

…or…

What caused X? Not A. Not B. Not C. But D.

…or…

What is the right course of action? Not A. Not B. Not C. But D.

Because the sense of investigation is strong in the problem-solution structure, you’ll find the approach particularly useful for persuasive papers. It’s also suitable for expository papers in which you present various other explanations before offering your own.

Pro-and-Con, or Exploratory, Structure. You set out to write an evaluation—of a movie, a book; a musical group, a team; an actor, a singer, an athlete, a poet, a political candidate; a policy, a theory, a technique. You’re familiar with your subject, but you quickly become aware that you’ve never reached any firm conclusion about it. Just how good or bad is the work, how competent or incompetent the performer, how wise or unwise the idea? In the prewriting stage you find your opinions zigzagging, with a “yes, but” or an “and yet” following immediately after each point for or against: “She did an excellent job in Movie A . .. but in B she overacted. Maybe comedy just isn’t her thing. . . though two years ago she almost won an Oscar for her performance in that very funny picture called C.” So it goes, as you explore the subject and finally reach a judgment, with strengths balanced against weak nesses and your own system of values determining the decision, or perhaps end up still undecided but with a much clearer understanding of the reasons for your in decision.

When you write a paper based on such internal conflict, or ambivalence, reproducing the zigzag movement of your thoughts may create a good pattern of organization. And you can use the same pattern when the conflict is external—when you begin with the opinions of two critics, one strongly pro and the other con, or the differing interpretations of two historians, or the projections of two economists, or the theories of football coaches or astronomers or psychologists. In all these cases you first undertake to present the opposing points of view and then give your support to one of the positions, explaining why you find it superior, or identify the common ground that makes it possible to reconcile them, or admit to an inability to choose between them.

Though the pro-and-con, or exploratory, structure resembles an organizational pattern used in comparisons, the purpose of these papers is not simply to compare but to arrive at a decision or a conclusion: Good or bad? Strong or weak? Right or wrong? The question can be phrased as a generalization to be examined and tested: Team X is the best in the league; Writer Y is a mediocre poet; Admissions policy Z is turning this college into a joke. But even when two opposing generalizations are involved, a question is still implicit: Sociologist A says that young people today are more religious than their parents; Sociologist B says that, for college students, religion is largely a fad; who’s right? Whether it begins with a question, a generalization, or two generalizations, the exploration should lead to a judgment, an answer. Or the conclusion—the discovery— may be that the question can’t be answered, that the problem can’t be solved, or that the truth isn’t found in either point of view.

The opening of a discussion of British colonialism in India shows the use of the pro-and-con pattern to probe competing generalizations. The first paragraph states the opposing points of view:

The British Raj: imperialist aggressors, exploiters of the Indian subcontinent, repressive tyrants betraying the principles of their own civilization. Or the British Raj: benevolent despots, peacemakers in India, enlightened rulers bringing order and efficiency where chaos had reigned and training in the most precious element of the Western tradition, democracy. Two views: one couched in the rhetoric of Indian nationalism, the other in that of the British administrators of India.

In the four paragraphs that follow, the author turns to the Indian charge of economic oppression and finds it essentially unproved. He does not, however, dismiss the charge out of hand; his method is to moderate and refine the initial generalization rather than to reject it. Notice the repeated use of but in the paragraphs analyzing the nationalists’ claim. The pro-and-con movement is well suited to the practice of making distinctions that qualify an initial generalization.

The theme of economic distress and oppression was a fundamental part of the rhetoric of Indian nationalism. Nationalists pointed to India’s poverty and charged — but did not prove — that this poverty was the fault of the British Empire. The authors of this charge were themselves generally middle-class Indians enjoying at least fair economic security. Their argument was simple: India was poor; it was ruled by Britain; British interests took goods and money out of India to Britain; therefore India’s poverty was caused by British rule.

To describe the source of the charge is not to prove it false, but the failings of British economic policy in India show evidence of negative rather than of positive harm. Nineteenth-century Indians spoke often of the “drain” on India caused by the British by which they meant that there was a steady flow of gold and goods out of the country which was not balanced by an equal influx of goods of any kind. This drain, they claimed, impoverished India and caused the rural poverty and periodic famines that plagued the country.

There had been an actual drain of goods from India during the latter part of the eighteenth century and probably extending into the nineteenth, but it resulted less from British actions than from failures to act. Tariffs are a good example. British economic policy, the famous laissez-faire, prevented the creation of protective tariffs on goods coming into India; emergent Indian industries were thus left to the mercies of general competition. Only once did the British government take positive action directly against Indian interests—and that was to establish a tariff on Indian cotton in order to protect the Lancashire wool industry. But this move was the exception. British economic failure in India was generally the result of the absence of any action at all.

Not that the British Empire in India did not operate in the long run against the interests of Indians. The destruction of village industries through European competition and the failure to establish modern industries are probable evidence of the destructive effects of British rule. It has been argued that the passion of the British governors for caution and economy kept them from undertaking programs that would have been beneficial to the country and policies that might have led to the eventual industrialization of India. But if, India failed to progress, it seems fair to say that it was less because of the conscious policy o fits rulers than because of the combination of current economic fashion and the unconscious, though consistent, British pursuit of imperial interests. British policy may have damaged the Indian economy, and India’s poverty may have been a function of British rule. But twenty years after independence and partition, it’s more difficult and less convincing to charge British imperial ism alone with the responsibility. — Norman F. Cantor, The Age of Protest

In the remainder of the passage, the author examines the British claim that imperialism brought enlightenment to India and gave training in democracy. Again he makes distinctions, demonstrating that while political oppression was sporadic, psychological oppression was chronic and its effects widespread. Again the pro-and-con structure affords the means of testing and refining the initial generalization. The upshot of the discussion is a new view of “the British Raj”—one different from either of those presented at the start.

Choosing a Structure. The actual organization of most long papers is more complex than the patterns we’ve out lined so far. Often a paper includes several generalizations of roughly equal importance, and instead of being lumped at either beginning or end, they’re distributed so that each is the core of one section of the paper. Even so, the progression within each section is likely to approximate one:

[[[Support

generalization

////

item 1 item 2 item 3

Discovery

item 1

item 2

1

item 3

(leading to)

generalization]]]

[[[Pro-and-Con or Exploration

/

but

/

pro

but

con

/

(leading to)

conclusion]]]

These are the basic movements. Of course, you’ll need to arrange your examples (or details or pieces of evidence) in a sequence that makes sense — chronological, simple-to- complex, increasing importance, or whatever suits your purpose.

As we saw in Section Two, division is treated in a sup port structure, with the various parts or stages set forth at the outset and then taken up in turn. In a classification, use either support or discovery. If you’re classifying television commercials, you might say at the start that you’ve turned up four main kinds of appeal, identify each in a sentence or two, and then discuss them in turn, moving from the least common to the most common or according to some other principle. Or you might begin with a description of one commercial as representative of its class, move to a striking example of a second class, and so on. The first option emphasizes the class; the second high lights individual examples.

When you organize a passage of causal analysis, you can first list the causes (or effects) and then take them up one by one, or you can introduce them one after the other until your analysis is complete. If your aim is to weigh and judge several possible causes, you may use the pro-and- con movement (“Some evidence points to this cause, but . . .“; “However, this doesn’t seem likely because .“; and so on). You have comparable options when you define.

We’ve already examined three common organizational patterns for comparisons. Which you choose will depend on how complex your material is and what your purpose is. If you decide to summarize the upshot of the comparison before going into it in detail (“The United States as we know it represents the philosophy of Alexander Hamilton far more than it does the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson”), you’ll be using the support structure. For some papers you may find that shaping your comparison into either the discovery or the pro-and-con pattern will suit your purpose better.

A paper needn’t follow only one pattern from start to finish. Indeed, a long paper is unlikely to. It may be made up of a half-dozen sections or paragraph sequences, each with a recognizable movement of its own—particular-to- general, general-to-particular, pro-and-con. The key to firm structure is being sure that though each section has its own identity and makes its own contribution to the writer’s purpose, it’s also a functioning part of the design of the whole.

• For Analysis and Writing

From a web blog, or book of readings, or a current magazine, choose an explanatory or a persuasive essay or article. Describe its large-scale organization, and consider alternative ways the material might have been presented. Taking into account the author’s purpose and the probable audience, explain why you think he did or didn’t find a good way of structuring his discussion. (Turn in the book, the magazine, or a photocopy of the selection with your analysis.)

For this exercise, read the selection several times to get firm control of the content, and then prepare any kind of summary that will help you indicate the large-scale features of the organization.

Associational Order

Instead of basing your paper on a perceived order in time or space or on an order that another writer could invent and impose on the same material, you may follow a pattern suggested by the associations the subject sets off in your mind. Though not often suitable for college papers, as sociational order can work well when a distinctly personal flavor is appropriate. Instead of giving a chronological account of the building of a house or using a space order in describing its interior, you might open your paper with a description of the house as it appeared to you when your family first moved into it, perhaps, and then drift from one memory to another as you recall the years you lived there. Such a paper would probably end up telling more about you and what your memory clings to than about the house and what it looked like, but if done well it could have charm, drama, humor, tragedy. Unless it’s handled skill fully, however, associational order may be confusing, and the paper as a whole may seem rambling and pointless.

• For Analysis and Writing

1. Examine this complete paper, paying special attention to its organization.

So Much Going On

--1 Because his air bubble nest wasn’t ready, he attacked her savagely, his jaws clamping down on her tail fin. She wriggled free and like a gray bullet streaked to the other side of the aquarium, where she took refuge in a web of twisted underwater plants. Having defended his home, the male Siamese Fighting Fish returned to his secluded corner and continued to blow bubbles of air coated with saliva. Each pearl of air rose dizzily to the surface of the water, bobbed momentarily, and then adhered to the other bubbles. Within a week there were hundreds of these jewels of air floating in a mass. The nest was near completion. As each new bubble rose, the female, swollen with eggs, became more desperate. Finally she left her grove of protective vines and once again approached her future mate. This time his nest was ready and he could devote himself to the beautiful creature be fore him. In anticipation of a mating, her sides were no longer a dusty gray but boldly streaked with glistening blue.

--2 The male put on his show. He fanned out his plumes of dark violet streaked with a lighter shade. He shook his body, and the sailing fins waved furiously. Gracefully he dropped to the rocks below, the female following his every move. Suddenly from below her abdomen, the eggs spewed. The male quickly passed over them several times, depositing a cloud of sperm. Now the female was hungrily eyeing her fertilized eggs. Her mate opened his mouth in a wide “0” and darted toward her. She had felt his wrath before, however, and was gone before he reached her wake. Because of her voracious appetite for her own young, the male would never again let her come near them. Scooping a cluster of fertilized eggs into his mouth, the male Fighting Fish transported them up to the floating air bubbles. Due to the care of their father, the new-born young would be assured of plenty of oxygen when they hatched.

--3 Peering into the microscope, looking at the drop of pond water sandwiched between the slide and the lens, one feels that he’s stealing his way into a fantastic sub-world of nimble beasts a hundred times smaller than a speck of sand. They dart three-quarters across the field of vision, stop, then whirl about and cavort away. Here comes another tumbling about. One can only stare in awe at his enormous littleness. The seemingly playful antics often disguise their true nature. Give them half a chance and they will attack tissue and tear it to pieces like crazed, silent assassins.

--4 But this new, mysterious world under the microscope can be inhabited by other things besides strange animals and plants. Under the glass a few slivers of hair are transformed into great rough logs. One steps back, awed at the outlandish perfection of the sting of a worker bee or the barbed leg of a mosquito or the thousand light receptors on the “eye” of a fly. What a thrill to see the orange, sun-shaped egg of a sea urchin bombarded by thousands of tiny, comet-like sperm. When one finally crashes through the membrane, a new organism is born under your eyes. With the right simple mixture under the lens, one can see a co-acervate, the pre-cellular form that gave rise to life—and you don’t have to go back millions of years to see it.

--5 The other chicks have pecked their way out of their wonder fully protected shells. But one little fellow hasn’t the strength to peck out more than a small window. The air circulates in, hardening the blood and membranes. The protective shell has been transformed into a suffocating, binding prison. Soon he will die unless you free him. Bit by bit you peel off the shell flakes. He peeps in pain when the dried membrane is stripped from his delicate feathers. Soon the exhausted chick lies prostrate on the paper. Propped up by your hand, he toddles on wobbly legs that quickly collapse. He lies flat, his legs bent crazily sideways. They punch outwards with astonishing vigor, but they never get under him. He gropes and tumbles, raising false hopes. But it’s to no avail. He is a splay chicken. The tendons in his legs never took hold, and he will never walk. Humans like this are put in wheel chairs and fed. Not chickens. It’s a sad paradox that you have to take this chick whose life you’ve saved and plunge him head first into a beaker of water. His mouth closes and opens frantically, gasping for air. But all that enters is heavy, suffocating water. Soon his lungs are filled, and he stops struggling. Your own face feels uncomfortably hot and your shirt is all sweaty.

--6 Dissecting a shark’s head, one is appalled by the vast sub way system of olfactory organs that lies beneath the tough leather hide. The horseshoe-shaped canal, with turnstile plates that first sense the moving chemicals in the water, is fascinatingly intricate. As commuters on subway trains are moved from place to place, so the chemical sensations are transmitted from organ to organ until they reach the brain. A big-thumbed male frog jumps on a female frog ripe with eggs. He holds her in his powerful grip and punches her sides until the eggs come flowing out. At the same time his sperm mixes with the eggs. Why do the frogs fertilize externally rather than internally? In an hour the fertilized eggs divide once, then twice. Soon a cluster forms, then a hollow ball. Then a turning-in occurs, a neural plate arises from the buckling outer layer, an elongation slowly takes place, and soon a tadpole is swimming about. The pleasant, powerful aroma of the sea that still clings to seaweed is overwhelming. A paramecium bumbles upon a salty concentration of water and begins to shrink. Why? And to take it a step further, what can it tell a nurse who must prepare an intravenous feeding mixture? A decapitated frog still shows a scratch reflex—how come? A pregnant mouse toddles with the weight of twelve youngsters in her. Placing her little paws around her head, she bears the pain of dropping them out one by one. One tiny pink tyke strays away from the nest. It’s easy to pick him up by the tail and return him to his mother. And all the friendly, sour, grateful, crabby, shy, carefree, happy, apprehensive, funny, and serious classmates that come are just as fascinating as the marvelous things already there.

--7 To think that some students say “it’s all in the book so there’s no sense wasting one’s time in the Biology lab!”

a. Describe the organization of “So Much Going On.” To be gin with, what are its main parts or divisions? What’s the writer’s purpose? Is that purpose stated explicitly? If so, where? Do all the parts of the paper contribute to the chief point the writer is trying to make?

b. Has the writer made clear his psychological point of view, his attitude toward his material? Has he established a physical point of view (a viewing point) and maintained it consistently? Study his use of personal pronouns to see how he locates himself in relation to his material.

c. Now that you’ve described the organization, evaluate it. Is the material developed according to any plan you can recognize? Is there a spatial movement that permits you to visualize the laboratory? Is there a chronological movement — events arranged in a time sequence or according to the order in which objects or activities are observed? Is there a progression that makes sense in terms of bringing out the significance of what’s being observed? If not, should there be? Or is this kind of material suitable for an essay that is ordered largely on the basis of the writer’s associations? If so, what are the associations that apparently govern the order of details?

d. If you think the organization is weak, try to identify the main source of the weakness. Is it the writer’s uncertainty in handling point of view? Is it his uncertainty about what impression he wants to leave with the reader? Or what?

e. Sketch three plans for organizing the material in this paper, one relying mainly on spatial relations, one on temporal relations, and one on association. Specify an audience and a purpose for each. Which of these plans do you think would make the best paper in the rhetorical situation? Are any or all of your plans better than the one you assume the writer followed? If so, in what respects?

f. Try rewriting the paper, using the bulk of the material but rearranging it as you think best. Pay special attention to the beginnings and endings of your paragraphs.

g. Reread the paper, taking into account the content and style as well as the organization. What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses?

2. Describe the organization of the article reprinted below. State the writer’s purpose, and show how the organization of the material helps him accomplish it.

Apple & Beech, Birch & Oak

--1 Woodcutting is full of sensuous and kinesthetic rewards. There is the rhythmic thock of the ax, with every second stroke freeing flat-spinning chips of yellowish wood. The special alertness of felling builds up during preliminary notching cuts and rises to a breathless moment when the treetop loses the symmetry of its sway, hovers against the sky for a moment, and then sweeps over with fierce cracking as the trunk thunders to the ground with branches thrashing. When limbs are cut free with diagonal-slicing ax strokes, the ellipses of fresh-cut wood gleam against the bark in the soft forest light. As wood is bucked into portable lengths, measured multiples of what your fireplace accepts, the saw generates little conical hills of cuttings; coarser than carpentry sawdust, these tiny cubes of pale damp wood creep into boot tops and pockets. When wood is split in the yard by the woodshed there comes a time when a husky billet of hard wood, almost too big and cross-grained to be ax-splittable, nevertheless responds to a precise blow by dropping apart in two even pieces, their inner faces moist and fragrant at this first exposure to light and air. Toward dusk there is an enjoyably tired feeling as the day’s yield is stacked for seasoning, the wedge-sectioned pieces fitted evenly, like a carefully built stone wall, Only stove- wood is allowed to remain in a tumbled heap.

--2 Getting in your own firewood has much to recommend it, if not done of necessity. Felling, limbing, bucking, and splitting are the four basic steps in the process, none difficult to bring off passably, and yet none so simple that your technique cannot be bettered. Prodigious exertions are not called for, although it’s somewhat more strenuous than golf or other conventional absorbents of leisure. It’s work that is likely to blister the hands or crick the back unless undertaken along a gentle slope of habituation.

--3 You can do a considerable amount of creative resting in the woods, seated on a log, absently rubbing tired muscles, studying the intricate topography of bark, reading the now-ended calendar of tree rings, smelling the fresh woody fragrances, watching the chipmunk or bluejay come closer to scout the meaning of your silence. Almost alone among outdoor pursuits, woodcutting is unaffected by weather, and can be engaged in at all times except drenching cold rain or driving sleet (it is quite magical during a snowstorm). You automatically work at a tempo attuned to the temperature, easily enough to keep from steaming on a golden day in Indian summer, briskly enough to keep comfortable when north winds icily rake the woods.

--4 Unlike many leisure activities, woodcutting delivers a product in return for time and effort, a pile of beautiful, well- split hardwood, abounding in promise of bright fires radiating their magic on winter nights. The degree of satisfaction is curiously high. It’s not altogether clear why a filled woodshed should be so reassuring, more so than shelves of cans and jars in the cupboard, or a freezer chest chock full of frosted parcels. Some shadowy motivation is buried here, something to do with the peripheral rewards of possessions, and with a need for making experience tangible and visible to others.

--5 Perhaps a clue can be sensed by considering people whose leisure activities don’t afford a product. If you observe the cameras earned in such profusion by returning travelers as they flow through customs weirs, it’s possible to conclude that the profoundest need filled by vacation photography is documentation. Pictures, studied and shown about, function as a kind of certification of experience, and generally they don’t bleach as fast as memory. Returning travelers carry, in addition to luggage and cameras, an extraordinary volume of gifts and bric-a-brac. From the balcony above the arrival pens at an international air port, a jetload of tourists tends to look as if most of them were victims of besetting generosity or compulsive connoisseurship. The scene suggests that possessions bought abroad and carried home have high value as confirmation of time well spent, proof less evanescent than airline tags left dangling and customs symbols chalked on luggage.

--6 People appear to buy knickknacks for the oddest of motives, not the least of which is the conversation that can be casually constructed about them later. Evidently recollection is for many persons simply not sufficient, and a physical thing or image sup plies welcome additional testimony.

--7 As for the filled woodshed, it’s true that few countrymen whip out a camera to document the achievement of several cords of beech, but it’s noticeable that conspicuous supplies of’ fire wood are frequently stacked in an open shed in no way concealed from those driving past. Firewood is after all not as inherently invisible as those parcels in the freezer, and a possession that is invisible is somehow slightly diminished.

--8 Getting in firewood is a many-faceted activity, and not the least of its benefits is a sense of calm. You may stride off to the woods bearing, along with ax and saw, a well-nourished grievance; you are almost certain to return with, if you think of it at all, detached surprise that the matter could have been so trouble some. Woodcutting is a sovereign remedy for a churny mind, a specific for festering concern. It works its spell not so much by substitution (which is what skiing does, it being difficult to cherish a grievance while hurtling downhill in continuous alarm over narrowly averted catastrophe) as by the more subtle method of transference. Using an ax or splitting sledge is of course a form of sanctioned violence, and it takes only a half-hour’s tussle with some mulish hickory to mop up any likely supply of hostility. This is nothing so simple as venting one’s spleen on poor, harmless trees: it’s instead a kind of cancellation, perhaps a physiologic process related to the sensations of using the large muscles.

--9 Woodcutting also provides a second form of psychotherapy by presenting a series of small, engrossing, and delightfully soluble problems. A tree is felled exactly where it’s supposed to fall, despite a slight lean in another direction; threatened pinching of the saw kerf is avoided by reordering the natural sequence of bucking cuts; an unsplittably gnarled crotch is finessed by relocation of fireplace lengths. It’s not necessary to pretend that these are substantial achievements, nor anything more than routine to a woodsman; it’s just that the successful solution of random problems, however small, is tonic to the spirits. Certainly it could not have been by chance that Wilhelm II, the last of the German emperors, his restlessly proud and never very stable mind corroded by an awareness of a world war disastrously lost, spent time each exiled day in woodcutting. But it’s not necessary to have the Marne, and Verdun, and the utter ruin of an empire on your mind to find reliable serenity in the woodlot.

__10 Of course it doesn’t always go well. Sometimes a tree chosen for cutting because it looks peckish, no longer a sturdy member of its company, falls with a distinctively hollow thump and shatters, revealing a punky interior so far gone in corruption as to be worth no more work. (A fireplace fire is contemptuous of punky wood, burning it sullenly, as a reluctant duty.) Occasionally the felling goes awry, from miscalculation of lean or veering of the wind during the wavery moment when a tree has concluded to fall but has not yet fixed on direction. It may maliciously slant off course and lodge, half fallen, propped by the upper branches of a neighboring tree. This is a woodcutter’s embarrassment, impossible to explain to anyone who happens by as something intended, and impossible to abandon, being a deadfall peril. If it cannot be jounced free, the choice is either to fell the second tree too, or to dislodge the hang-up by roffing it or by using a log chain to drag the butt out until the top breaks free. The work is arduous, a little dangerous, and thoroughly frustrating.

__11 On those infrequent days when malign spirit, flit through the woods to perch on branches nearby, all woodcutting can grow cranky. With each bucking cut the trunk rolls to new positions of inconvenience, and the saw binds inexplicably, and the ax glances wickedly, and the footing is precarious while you are trudging with a heavy four-length log on your shoulder. It’s prudent to gather up your tools and depart on such a day. Don’t even stop to split what’s been cut: the first piece will simply swallow three wedges, and smile. — Frank Rowsome, Jr., Atlantic

3. Paying special attention to selecting and maintaining your point of view, write an account of a high-school graduation, a memorial service, or some other ceremonial occasion. Your reader is a member of your family who was not present. Your purpose is to make this reader see the occasion as you saw it and react to it as you did.

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