Authors use organizational patterns to arrange and present their ideas in ways that will make sense to readers. If you can recognize the most common informational text structures, you can more easily see the relationships among ideas in a text. And knowing those relationships helps you connect new information more quickly and accurately to what you already know.
Chronological order is all about time or sequence. It is an essential text structure in informational writing that shows you how to do or make something. If you read instructions for how to repair your bicycle, or a report about historical events, you will encounter a text structure that moves from one step or event to the next, in the order the events occurred or should occur.
Comparative text structure, on the other hand, is used to compare or contrast two or more events, people, concepts, or ideas. When you read a review comparing a book to a movie, or an article comparing two presidents' styles of leadership, you will see this organizational pattern. In some texts, the author will go back and forth between the two things being compared. In other texts, an author might put all the details about one item together, and then put the details about the second one together.
For example, an article comparing two styles of tennis shoes might compare first the price of the shoes, and then the colors, fit, and style. Meanwhile, another article on the same topic might describe the first style of shoes in detail, and then describe the second style using comparable, or similar, categories of detail.
The easiest way to identify the text structure of a piece of informational text is to look for transition words and phrases--then match them up with the correct organizational pattern. See how many transition words you know for each of these organizational patterns.
What transition words indicate this organizational pattern?
chronological organization
first, second, next, last, before, after, followed by, finally, now, soon
What transition words do authors use?
in comparative organization
like, similar, on the other hand, yet, as well as, either/or, as opposed to
Summary
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Incorrect:
