74 Arranging Paragraphs
The genre you’re writing in will likely be the most important determining factor in deciding when to paragraph or where to place your paragraphs. For example, the organizing principles for an argumentative essay based on research and citation of multiple sources will require you to think about where you’ll place the paragraphs that make the strongest points, whereas an analysis essay may require a spatial or appeals-based organization that guides the reader through various elements within a written, oral, visual, or electronic artifact. In this section, we’ll discuss different theories guiding writers’ arrangement of paragraphs.
Primacy vs. Recency
To elaborate on the organization of argumentative, research-based essays, some writers tend to think in terms of primacy versus recency. When a writer steps back to look at the many paragraphs they wrote, they might rearrange paragraphs to place their strongest points in strategic locations. When organizing with primacy in mind, a writer might place paragraphs featuring their strongest claims and evidence early on in the piece to persuade readers from the start. With primacy, the writer strategically chooses if they want their reader to encounter persuasive information immediately so that they read the rest of the essay in agreement with the author. When a writer arranges the paragraphs to build toward or end with their strongest paragraphs toward the end, then the writer is organizing with recency in mind. Arranging paragraphs to end with the most persuasive information can help to win over a skeptical audience needing more information to be built into the body of a text before deciding if they’ll agree with the author.
Chronological
Of course, some texts lend well to chronological organizations. If you’re writing an essay that will contain many dates or pertinent historical events, then a chronological organization enables you to arrange paragraphs in accordance with a historical timeline. For analyses, a chronological order sometimes works to support the writer and reader in moving carefully, one-by-one through the placement of features of a text to be analyzed. For narrative essays, a chronological organization can feel like an easy go-to method for developing your organization. However, take special caution to avoid giving a simplified plot summary for narrative essays, and consider structuring a narrative essay out-of-order or in a non-linear fashion much like thriller movies do to keep the audience interested and piecing together what happens next.
Spatial
A spatial organization can be incredibly helpful for arranging paragraphs in analysis papers, particularly those that are geared more toward visual rhetorical analysis. Spatial relates to the word space, and when conducting a spatial analysis, you might think about how the eye moves across the space of a text. For example, when we naturally analyze, our eyes tend to look for focal points, centering objects, or the direc