Arrangement Readings

The main difference I see between the readings is how they view arrangement. Lindemann seems to talk about arrangement as discovering and developing the form of your paper; she talks about everything from the five-paragraph form taught to us before college to Frank D’Angelo’s paradigms, which helps to form and arrange our thoughts and ideas in an “orderly manner”. Her point, or at least what I got from it, is to pick the subject apart enough to find the best way to organize and arrange the material, and she shares several examples of this.

Podis also talks about organization as a big part of arrangement. He mentions that good organization does a good job at highlighting the point of your paper. He also incorporates some of Lindemann’s ideas but focuses more on specific examples of arrangement. He mentions the order in which you lay out your points and how they all affect the reader differentlf. For example, start with more general ideas to start a paragraph off and then lead to more specific ideas. You don’t want your ideas randomly spread across the entire paper; instead, group them into similar areas so that your paper flows.

None of their ideas were new to me, but some of the points and examples given were. I gathered a lot of helpful information, including how I will organize my paper. I liked Lindemann’s cause/effect paradigm she laid out, and also Podis’ example of the pattern, which also includes cause/effect but goes deeper by explaining how to organize those causes by importance. I wrote down several examples from both to help my organize my thoughts.