Saturday, 27 April 2019

Fifteenth Lesson

Organizing and shaping your writing

Some structure used in university writing

Now let us consider the shape of work from a different angle by looking at some ways of organizing material into different kinds of structure that are commonly used in university writing. Here are seven examples of some structures commonly used in university writing in this lesson we discuss three of them. 

  1. Chronology writing 
      This structure follows time with a sense of the sequence of events, one following another. You relate or recount what happened. This may naturally, often be used in history. Chronology can be expressed visually as a timeline which shows the sequence of events during a certain period as a calendar does. A similar structure may be used to tell the plot of a novel or film. Chronology writing might well appear at the beginning of an assignment, to give the background to the rest of the piece.
   
     2. Description writing

       Description usually needs to be followed by or linked to explanation. The visual way to represent description may be as a diagram, with labelled parts as in biology. However, if we are describing something more abstract - for example, the characteristics of the twentieth-century family then a spider diagram may be a good way to build up our thinking.

     3. Cause-effect writing

        In practice you will not get far in recounting what happened without bringing in cause and effect, which relate events to each other. Take a simple example; the king died; the people rejoiced. For this to make sense we need to know why the people rejoiced. However, the idea of a straight correlation between two events - that something is caused by something else is often seen as a bit simplistic. 
    
                       

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