Arrangement
"Sometimes you outline, sometimes you just hack your way through the tall grass."
—Stephen Graham Jones qtd. in Brown, 2021.
One of the rhetorical canons, arrangement is an important consideration for most writers and, though perhaps less obvious, it has a huge impact on readers. How is a successful text structured?
Aristotle and other ancients offered specific arrangements for successful argumentation. For our purposes, we do well to note that rhetorical arrangement should include a beginning (the introduction), a body that moves through a logical order of ideas intended to be persuasive to the target audience, and a conclusion.
An organized text. A piece with "flow." It's what most writers aspire to: an order that helps make their ideas clear and their readers continue, saying "ooh" and "ah yes." Structure doesn't just happen: writers need to plan.
Arrangement and planning may not be what you think! Again, Yumna Samni and Crash Course provide some excellent examples in this video.
"As the second canon, following invention, arrangement has to do with finding an effective order of arguments in a speech or writing. A writer or orator begins by exploring possible lines of argument (invention), which would then be arranged into the most persuasive order and styled to meet the needs of the audience" (45).
—Sharon Kirsch, 2014
Learning about your own approaches to the writing process and planning
In my own thinking, there are two very different approaches to planning and outlining for writers: the before-drafting method for “plan-then-do” writers, and the after-drafting method, for writers with a “do-then-see” attitude.
Which kind of writer are you? If you like to plan ahead and always use a map, you’re probably a plan-then-do writer. But if you’ve ever said “I’d rather just start and see where I end up” or “I don’t want to waste the time with an outline I won’t follow anyway…” then you might want to try the do-then-see approach. The approach you choose may also differ based on writing task variations such as length, purpose, assignment expectations, complexity of ideas, or your stress level. (The secret is that many writers use both approaches.)
Works Cited
Brown, Jena. “Q&A: Stephen Graham Jones, Author of ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw.’” The Nerd Daily, 4 Oct. 2021. https://thenerddaily.com/stephen-graham-jones-author-interview/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2023.
Kirsch, Sharon J. Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric. University Alabama Press, 2014.
