Should you just choose any idea, then, and start writing, adding in other ideas as you remember them? Not if you want your report to make sense! There are several well-tested ways to organize the ideas in an informative report. The video below explains the two most common ones.
Start Small or Go Big
Narrator:
Two useful ways to organize your informational or explanatory text are General to Specific and Specific to General.
General to Specific starts off with a big, broad idea that eases your audience into the topic. It helps orient your reader before you dive into the specific facts and details of your argument.
Let’s say you’re writing an informative report about bullying in schools and its effects on students. A general to specific introduction might begin with by talking about how feeling safe and accepted is a basic human need for everyone in the world. Then you might zoom in to discuss how this need is especially important in high school, where teenagers are forming their individual identities. Zooming in further, you could talk about how bullying shatters this safety and acceptance.
On the other side is Specific to General. This style grabs your reader’s attention by giving them a purposeful and interesting fact or example, then shows how it applies to the larger issue.
In a report about bullying, a Specific to General essay might start with a true story about one individual victim of bullying, and the tragic outcome. You could then zoom out and say that this story isn’t an isolated case. Zoom out more and show statistics and surveys about how widespread bullying is, then zoom all the way out to help the reader understand that it’s a national problem. Now, when you sum up your ideas, your audience will know not only how damaging bullying is to individual people, they’ll also see it as a critical problem in society.
Question
One of your classmates starts a report on national zoos with a description of one specific zoo. What type of structure is this student using?
