Think about a Lego tower you are building. All of the decisions you make go into the structure of your building. You might decide:
- How big will the base be, to hold up the rest of the building?
- How many floors will you have?
- What colors will you use for each floor?
- What decorations will you put on the building?
- Will there be stairs or an elevator?
- Are there enough doors and windows? Emergency exits?
If you think about it this way, when authors write text, they make these types of decisions too.
- The "base" might be the introduction. How much background knowledge does your reader have or do you need to put more information at the start so your reader can follow along?
- The "floors" might be sections. How many sections or paragraphs will you have? Will you have subheadings for different sections?
- The "colors" might be what you put in the sections. What is your strongest starter? Do you want to entertain or inform? What types of words will you be using?
- The decorations may be "extras" you add (quotes, maps, pictures, etc.)
- When you're thinking about stairs vs. elevators, or doors and windows, think of the text's organization. Does the design of the text make sense? Can a reader follow it from beginning to end without a problem?
Below is the power point we used to discuss this idea in class on Tuesday, and the examples we used. You MUST become familiar with the different types of text structures before you can move on to the application of this concept.
