Effective Organization

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Effective Organization

• Matt Barton

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Organization

• Organization covers these topics
• Titles
• Subheadings
• Introduction
• Transitions
• Conclusion
• First, some general thoughts on organization.

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Why Organize?

• Disorganized writing
• is difficult and boring.
• seems sloppy or poorly thought-out
• Good organization helps readers see connections
  between ideas.

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What is Good Organization?

• Know the genre.
• Formal, scientific, or academic documents are
  upfront and explicit about their organization..
• Less formal documents may be more subtle
  organization.
• Model your work on outstanding examples from the
  genre.

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Organizational Schemes

• Some common schemes are
• Chronological or time-based
• Spatial (from left to right, up and down, etc.)
• Order of Importance
• Choose a scheme based on the type of information
  and what parts you want to emphasize.

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Titles

• Titles are important.
• A vague title may cause readers to ignore a
  document.
• A misleading title might frustrate readers
  looking for specific information.
• A boring title might cause readers to fall asleep
  before they read the first sentence!

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Good Titles

• Be clear, accurate, catchy, and memorable.
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph
  Campbell.
• The World Is Flat A Brief History of the
  Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman.
• Freakonomics A Rogue Economist Explores the
  Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt
• The Game Penetrating the Secret Society of
  Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss

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Bad Titles

• Dont be vague, misleading, or boring.
• Consider these titles for essays
• Essay 1
• History Paper
• The Civil War An Essay
• Plato
• On the Various Means by which People who Play
  Videogames Solve Linguistic Puzzles

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Titles and Subtitles

• Many academics prefer a two-part title
• Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison by
  Michel Foucault.
• Writing Space Computers, Hypertext, and the
  Remediation of Print by Jay David Bolter.
• Bird by Bird Some Instructions on Writing and
  Life by Anne Lamott.
• Subtitle are usually more exact than the title.

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Puns and Word Plays

• Some authors prefer titles with a pun or a riff
  on other titles
• What to Expect When You're Expecting by Heidi
  Murkoff
• When Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It'll Be Me by
  Cynthia Heimel
• Babies and Other Hazards of Sex How to Make a
  Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You
  Probably Have around the Home by Dave Barry

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Alliteration or Rhyme

• Use poetry tools to create memorable titles
• Publish or Perish by Allan A. Glatthorn
• PublishDont Perish by Joe Moxley
• Beard On Bread by James Beard
• Dungeons and Dreamers by Brad King, John Borland

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Tips for Titles

• Make sure your title is a phrase or brief
  question, not a whole sentence.
• Dont use quotation or other title for your
  title
• 75 of the Students Surveyed Are Not Smokers
• The Study Indicates the Participant Suffered a
  Mild Side-Effect.
• Moby Dick

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Tips for Titles

• Think of what your paper is about, then write a
  specific subtitle.
• The Importance of Mathematics and Quantitative
  Reasoning
• Practical Guide for Improving Communication
  and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships
• Think about a short, catchy phrase that naturally
  flows into the subtitle
• Adding it Up The Importance of Mathematics
• Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

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More Tips

• Use a keyword from your paper as part of your
  title
• Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and
  Adorno
• Think of a short phrase that relates to your
  subject matter
• Cutting Out the Cut and Paste Turnitin.com and
  the War on Plagiarism
• To Promote Progress A Study of Patent Law

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Tips for Titles

• Wait until you are finished.
• Consider whether your title accurately reflects
  the content and themes of your paper.
• Say your title aloud several times to hear if it
  sounds good.

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Titles

• Horrible title
• Essay 1
• Bad title
• Blackboard Essay
• Better title
• Using Blackboard to Enhance Communication
• Even Better title
• Click to Send Using Blackboard to Enhance
  Student and Teacher Communication

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Subheadings

• Subheadings are useful ways to divide up portions
  of a document.
• Add subheadings after you have completed a
  document.
• Do not add too many subheadings.
• Subheadings are not a substitute for transitional
  words or phrases.

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Subheadings

• A lengthy essay on Blackboard might have these
  subheadings
• Announcements
• Discussion Boards
• Virtual Classrooms
• Gradebooks
• Costs and Performance
• Conclusion or Introduction should not be
  listed as subheadings.

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Introductions

• A good introduction
• States the issue at hand
• Establishes the authors position
• Describes organizational scheme
• Identifies the essays scope
• If you read the first paragraph or two and still
  dont know what the paper is about, the
  introduction isnt ready.
• Always revise the introduction when you are
  finished with the paper.

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State the Issue

• Dont beat around the bush, especially with a
  short essay. Get to the point right away.
• Microsoft PowerPoint is a more effective way to
  present information to students than chalkboards
  or overhead projections.
• Proprietary software may generate good profits,
  but open source software generates good
  programmers.
• Anti-abortion laws violate the principle that the
  state and the church should remain separate.

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Establish Your Position

• Dont start off sounding neutral or wishy-washy.
  Establish your position!
• Bad
• There are good points and bad points to having
  computers in the classroom.
• Good
• Teachers should avoid using computers in the
  classroom because they are expensive and
  distracting.

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Describe Organizational Scheme

• In formal, academic papers, you can be very
  explicit about your organization
• Being is made known through three basic modes of
  disclosure moods, which I discuss in section one
  of this article understanding, which I discuss
  in section two
• This paper is divided into three sections. The
  first section, Costs, discusses
• I will discuss three kinds of new media films,
  websites, and videogames. First

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Organizational Scheme

• You may be less explicit about your
  organizational scheme as long as the reader can
  easily determine your setup
• Students who wish to develop their writing skills
  must read often, study general principles and
  concepts, and reflect on their writing.
• Dutyhonorcountry. These three hallowed words
  reverently dictate what soldiers ought to be,
  what they can be, and what they will be.

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Scope

• Make sure the introduction informs readers what
  you intend to cover.
• Explicit
• This paper is concerned only with Walt Whitmans
  first edition of Leaves of Grass.
• Although there are many ways to transmit HIV, I
  will only discuss transmission via shared
  syringes.
• Dont raise points in the introduction that are
  not covered in the paper.

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Introductions

• If you want to write a more interesting paper,
  include an interesting example, detail, fact, or
  scenario that the reader with which the reader
  can relate.
• You can use a hypothetical situation, a real
  person, or even a creative analogy to help spur
  the readers interest.
• People enjoy reading about things they can relate
  to their own lives and experiences.

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Human Interest New Yorker

• Luna Dawood was twenty-four years old when Saddam
  Hussein paid a surprise visit to her house in
  Kirkuk, the ethnically mixed city in northern
  Iraq. He admits that she reacted like a
  teen-ager. It was an October afternoon in 1983,
  and two Presidential helicopters landed in an
  open field tanks cordoned off the tidy
  middle-class streets of the Arrapha neighborhood,
  home to employees of the state-owned Northern Oil
  Company and Saddam, flanked by a large security
  entourage, showed up at the Dawoods kitchen
  door
• (from a New Yorker essay called The Next Iraqi
  War)

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Introductions Time (less formal)

• Doug Gale, a 30-year-old Dallas banker, returned
  from a vacation to Tokyo and Hong Kong in 2001
  raving as much about TV sets as about ancient
  temples, towering skyscrapers and exotic food. A
  self-proclaimed tech geek, Gale scouted out
  electronics shops and was mesmerized by
  flat-screen TVs. "I'd never seen anything like
  them," he says of the TVs. "They were just
  phenomenal. As soon as I got back to Dallas I was
  thinking, 'I got to get me one of these!'"
• (from a recent Time article)

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The hook

• In Victorian London, even in a place as
  notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the
  sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed
• From The Professor and the Madman, a book about
  the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Transitions

• Good writers ensure that their sentences connect
  to one another and that movements between
  paragraphs are smooth and even.
• Use appropriate transition words and phrases to
  signal to readers what is coming up next.
• Do not use transitional words if it is obvious
  what is coming next.
• Readers should always have a reasonable idea
  where the paper is headed. If a sentence seems to
  come out of nowhere, there is a problem.

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Transition

• Bad transition
• Blackboard is an expensive program. The
  discussion board feature enables students to
  communicate with each other outside of class.
• Good transition
• Blackboard is an expensive program, but its
  wealth of features make it worth the money. For
  example, the discussion board

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Transition

• Bad Transition
• Students are often tempted to download a paper
  from the Internet rather than write their own.
  Turnitin.com is a web-based plagiarism detection
  service.
• Good Transition
• For many years, the Internet was a cheaters
  dream come true. Thousands of essays on almost
  every conceivable topic were just a Google-search
  away. Never before had plagiarizing been so easy,
  but good things never last. Now teachers have a
  new web-based service called Turnitin.com that
  makes it easy to detect plagiarism and prevent
  cheating.

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Transitions

• Addition
• In addition, also, as well as
• Contrast
• However, on the contrary, on the other hand
• Illustration
• For example, for instance, in other words.

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Conclusions

• The big difference between an introduction and a
  conclusion is that the reader has read your
  paper.
• A good conclusion should
• Remind the reader of important points
• Explain what could or should be done to address
  the issue
• Suggest additional reading materials
• Make some final comments on the issue.

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Tips Donts

• Dont copy/paste your thesis statement or offer
  the same statement in slightly different terms.
• Dont sound wishy-washy or doubt yourself in the
  conclusion.
• Avoid In conclusion. After all, you dont start
  off an essay by saying In introduction, do you?
  Also avoid In summary, To sum up, and all
  variations.
• Dont start a new argument or raise new points in
  the conclusion.

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Tips Dos

• If you opened your document with a story, refer
  back to it and give the reader some idea of what
  will (or may) happen.
• If you are writing a persuasive paper, restate
  what you want the reader to do or think about the
  issue.
• Consider briefly mentioning some possible future
  topics for research or further reading
  suggestions.

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Conclusion New Yorker

• Dawood spoke so quietly that she might have been
  a ghost herself. What is a human being worth, if
  they steal such a place? Right now, being human
  means nothing to me. Im very sorry you brought
  me to this place. I shouldnt have come.

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Conclusion Time Magazine

• "In 10 years' time, it'll be embarrassing to have
  a regular, old-fashioned TV set," says Martin
  Reynolds, an analyst at technology-consulting
  company Gartner in Stamford, Conn. If the Asian
  glut continues, chances are you'll be able to
  have a flat TV hanging in your living room long
  before that.

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Conclusions

• Teaching the students to use free software, and
  to participate in the free software community, is
  a hands-on civics lesson. It also teaches
  students the role model of public service rather
  than that of tycoons. All levels of school should
  use free software.
• Richard Stallman
• If we videogamers and computer enthusiasts are
  truly on the forefront of technological progress,
  we should also be on the forefront of artistic
  progress. Mimicry and imitation are not the
  skills we should be requiring and cultivating in
  our electronic composers. We must try our best to
  fight our prejudice against new music and
  consider what the computer medium really has to
  offera whole new world of sound.
• Matt Barton

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Final Tips on Organization

• There are two ways to go about organization.
• One is to organize before you draft, using an
  outline or similar plan.
• Another is to organize after you draft, editing
  the document and rearranging material into a
  sensible scheme.
• Either one worksor do both!

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One Minute Writing

• What was the most interesting thing you learned
  from this presentation?