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Snap Language

Getting Smarter through Language

Modes of Organization
Organizing Information in Writing

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In a lesson about rhetorical modes of writing, we saw your writing falls into five broad categories or types of writing: expository, descriptive, persuasive, narrative, or reflective.

Having only five main rhetorical modes may seem to limit your options; however, within these types of writing you still have a great deal of flexibility to choose the mode of writing, or mode of organization, that communicates your main point the most effectively.

 

Essentially, this means that, regardless of the type of writing, you should still organize the information depending on the topic, your purpose for writing, and your audience.

Let’s examine several common ways of organizing information or rhetorical modes of writing: narration; description; definition; example or illustration; listing; comparison and contrast; process analysis or steps-in-a-process; division or classification; cause and effect; problem and solution; and persuasion.

Up Next: Narration Mode of Organization

Continue the lesson to learn about the narrative mode of organization.