Abstract

According to a recent survey, top and mid-level managers admit that one of the four main difficulties that beset them in their writing is to organize content. Yet another survey reports that of weaknesses found by college teachers of composition in freshman writing, inability to organize essays falls sixteenth, after, for instance, failure to proofread and over-use of the passive. 1 This gap between what students will need to be able to do on the job and what teachers think students need appears even more serious when one looks at how the teachers worded this sixteenth weakness: Students are aware of only one organizational pattern-the five-paragraph theme. Five paragraphs, of course, are not necessarily a pattern of organization at all, but rather a stylistic uniform. As we shall see, college freshmen, even writing impromptu on the second day of class, actually generate a variety of good organizational patterns. The implication is that writing teachers do not distinguish extended patterns in student writing very readily. This is an ungenerous conclusion, though later I will offer more support for it, and I hasten to say that college students often make their organization hard to see. Researchers, too, have not helped teachers here, and not one piece of research can be found even naming the sorts of organization that students do use for whole essays. Basic information seems called for. Such, at least, is all my essay here pretends to offer. First I will describe a classification of organizational patterns for whole essays and a method by which both teachers and researchers may use it to analyze student essays. Then I will report the results of such an analysis applied to a controlled study of underclass writing. Since this study distinguishes freshman, sophomore, junior, and competent adult levels of achievement, I can conclude with recommendations for teachers that are not wholly intuitive.