The town of Tiburon, CA kindly offers residents and visitors 3 minutes to park for free, which is about 2:59 minutes more than the typical reader is likely give to if they don't understand your organization. Photo Credit: Moxley
Definition
Organizational patterns may refer to commonplace organizational patterns in writing, such as
- Causal Order (aka Cause and Effect)
- Chronological Order
- Compare and Contrast
- Deductive Order
- Emphatic Order (aka Order of Importance)
- Inductive Order (aka Climatic Order)
- Logical Order
- Problem and Solution Order
- Instructions or Process Order (aka Sequential Order)
- Spatial Order
Different genres of discourse have uniques methods of organization.
Synonymous Terms
Organizational patterns may also be known as
- Organizational Sructures
- Organizational Schema (US) or Schemata (UK)
- mental models
- mental frameworks
- cognitive structures
- organizational framework
- knowledge structures
Related Concepts: Audience Awareness; Genre; Logical Reasoning; Page Design & Scannability
Why Do Organizational Patterns – Structures Matter?
- Texts that are well organized are more likely to be read and understood than those that are disorganized.
- Texts that follow conventional patterns are scannable.
- In today’s information ecosystem, most texts that are designed to be skimmed. In some instances, readers will only read certain parts of a text–such as a review of research section or a results section in a scientific article.
References
SHRM. (2017). Understanding Organizational Structures. Understanding Organizational Structures. https://sso.shrm.org/IDBUS/SHRM/PORTAL-EE/JOSSO/SSO/REDIR?josso_cmd=login&josso_partnerapp_id=portal-sp
