Mrs.

Sherry
AP English Lang. & Comp.

Patterns of Development*
Writers choose to employ various patterns of development (also called “modes”)
depending on the purpose(s) they’re trying to achieve. Is the writer’s purpose to
compare and contrast, to narrate an event, to define a term? Each of these
purposes suggests a method of organization or arrangement. These patterns of
development include a range of logical ways to organize an entire text or, more
likely, individual paragraphs or sections within a text. Here’s an overview of the
major patterns of development along with some examples of ways in which they
can be employed.
Narration
Narration refers to telling a story or recounting a series of events. It can be based
on personal experience or on knowledge gained from reading or observation.
Chronology usually governs narration, which includes concrete detail, a point of
view, and sometimes such elements as dialogue. Narration is not simply crafting
an appealing story; it is crafting a story that supports your thesis. Writers often
use narration as a way to enter into their topics. In the following example,
Rebecca Walker tells a story about her son to lead into her explanation of why
she put together the anthology Putting
Down the Gun (p. 412).
The idea for this book was born one night after a grueling
conversation with my then eleven-year-old son. He had
come home from his progressive middle school unnaturally
quiet and withdrawn,shrugging off my questions of concern
with uncharacteristic irritability. Where was the sunny,chatty
boy I dropped off that morning? What had befallen him in the
perilous halls of middle school? I backed off but kept a close
eye on him, watching for clues.
After a big bowl of his favorite pasta, he sat on a sofa in my
study and read his science textbook as I wrote at my desk.
We both enjoyed this simple yet profound togetherness, the
two of us focused on our own projects yet palpably
connected. As we worked under the soft glow of paper
lanterns, with the heat on high and our little dog snoring at
his feet, my son began to relax. I could feel a shift as he
 began to remember, deep in his body, that he was home,
that he was safe, that he did not have to brace to protect
himself from the expectations of the outside world.
Walker brings her audience into her experience with her son by narrating
step-by-step what happened and what she noticed when he returned from
school. It’s not only a personal story but also one that she will show has wider
significance in the culture. Narration has the advantage of drawing readers in
because everyone loves a good story.
Description
Description is closely allied with narration because both include many specific
details. However, unlike narration, description emphasizes the senses by painting
a picture of how something looks, sounds,smells, tastes, or feels. Description is
often used to establish a mood or atmosphere. Rarely is an entire essay
descriptive, but clear and vivid description can make writing more persuasive. By
asking readers to see what you see and feel what you feel, you make it easy for
them to empathize with you, your subject, or your argument. In the following
example from “Serving in Florida” (p. 179), Barbara Ehrenreich describes her
coworkers:
I make friends, over time, with the other “girls” who work my
shift: Nita, the tattooed twenty-something who taunts us by
going around saying brightly, “Have we started making money
yet?”Ellen, whose teenage son cooks on the graveyard shift
and who once managed a restaurant in Massachusetts but
won’t try out for management here because she prefers being
a “common worker” and not “ordering people around.”
Easy-going fiftyish Lucy, with the raucous laugh, who limps
toward the end of the shift because of something that has
gone wrong with her leg, the exact nature of which cannot be
determined without health insurance. We talk about the usual
girl things — men, children, and the sinister allure of Jerry’s
chocolate peanut-butter cream pie.
Ehrenreich’s primary purpose here is to humanize her coworkers and make her
readers understand their struggle to survive on the minimum wage. To achieve
this, she makes them specific living-and-breathing human beings who are
“tattooed” or have a “raucous laugh.”
Narration and description often work hand in hand, as in the following paragraph
from “Shooting an Elephant” (p. 979) by George Orwell. The author narrates the
death throes of the elephant in such dense and vivid detail that we mourn the
loss and realize that something extraordinary has died, and the narrator (Orwell),
like all of us, is diminished by that passing — which is the point Orwell wants us
to understand:
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the
kick — one never does when a shot goes home — but I
heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.
In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought,
even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change
had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but
every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly
stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful
impact of the bullet had paralyzed him without knocking him
down. At last, after what seemed a long time— it might have
been five seconds, I dare say — he sagged flabbily to his
knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him
thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At
the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with
desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright,
with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time.
That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony
of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of
strength from his legs.
But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind
legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like
a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree.
He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he
came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to
shake the ground even where I lay.
Note the emotionally charged language, such as “devilish roar of glee,” and the
strong verbs such as “slobbered,” “did not collapse but climbed.” Note the
descriptive details: “jolt,” “sagging,” “drooping,” “desperate slowness.” The
language is so vivid that we feel as though a drawing or painting is emerging with
each detail the author adds.
Process Analysis
Process analysis explains how something works, how to do something, or how
something was done. We use process analysis when we explain how to bake
bread or set up an Excel spreadsheet, how to improve a difficult situation or
assemble a treadmill. Many self-help books are essentially process analysis. The
key to successful process analysis is clarity: it’s important to explain a subject
clearly and logically, with transitions that mark the sequence of major steps,
stages, or phases of the process. In the essay “Transsexual Frogs”(p. 655),
Elizabeth Royte uses process analysis to explain the research of Tyrone Hayes,
a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley investigating the impact of
the pesticide atrazine.
The next summer Hayes headed into the field. He loaded a
refrigerated 18 wheel truck with 500 half-gallon buckets and
drove east, followed by his students. He parked near an
Indiana farm, a Wyoming river, and a Utah pond, filled his
buckets with 18,000 pounds of water, and then turned his rig
back toward Berkeley. He thawed the frozen water, poured it
into hundreds of individual tanks, and dropped in thousands
of leopard-frog eggs collected en route. To find out if frogs in
the wild showed hermaphroditism, Hayes dissected juveniles
from numerous sites. To see if frogs were vulnerable as
adults, and if the effects were reversible, he exposed them to
atrazine at different stages of their development.
In this example, Royte explains how something was done, that is, the actual
physical journey that Hayes took when he “headed into the field”: he traveled
from California to Indiana, Wyoming, Utah, and back to California. The verbs
themselves emphasize the process of his work: he “loaded,” “parked,” “filled,”
“turned . . . back,” “thawed,” “poured,” and “dropped.”
Exemplification
Providing a series of examples — facts, specific cases, or instances — turns a
general idea into a concrete one; this makes your argument both clearer and
more persuasive to a reader. A writer might use one extended example or a
series of related ones to illustrate a point. You’re probably familiar with this type
of development. How many times have you tried to explain something by saying,
“Let me give you an example”? Aristotle taught that examples are a type of
logical proof called induction. That is, a series of specific examples leads to a
general conclusion. If you believe, for example, that hip-hop culture has gone
mainstream, you might cite a series of examples that leads to that conclusion.
For example, you could discuss hip-hop music in chain-store advertising, the
language of hip-hop gaining widespread acceptance, and entertainers from many
different backgrounds integrating elements of hip-hop into their music.
In the following paragraph from “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” (p.
89), Francine Prose establishes the wide and, she believes, indiscriminate range
of readings assigned in high school classes by giving many examples of those
her own sons have read:
 My own two sons, now twenty-one and seventeen, have read
(in public and private schools) Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and
Melville. But they’ve also slogged repeatedly through the
manipulative melodramas of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou,
through sentimental middlebrow favorites (To Kill a
Mockingbird and A Separate Peace), the weaker novels of
John Steinbeck, the fantasies of Ray Bradbury. My older son
spent the first several weeks of sophomore English
discussing the class’s summer assignment, Ordinary People,
a weeper and former bestseller by Judith Guest about a
“dysfunctional” family recovering from a teenage son’s
suicide.
Prose develops her point by giving examples of authors, novels, and types of
novels. But only in the case of Ordinary People does she discuss the example.
The others are there to support her point about the rather random nature of
books assigned in high school classrooms. In the following paragraph, instead of
giving several examples, Prose uses one extended example to make the point
that even so-called great literature is often poorly taught. Note how she mines the
example of Huckleberry Finn to discuss the various objections and concerns she
has about teaching:
It’s cheering that so many lists include The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn — but not when we discover that this
moving, funny novel is being taught not as a work of art but as
a piece of damning evidence against that bigot, Mark Twain. A
friend’s daughter’s English teacher informed a group of
parents that the only reason to study Huckleberry Finn was to
decide whether it was a racist text. Instructors consulting
Teaching Values Through Teaching Literature will have
resolved this debate long before they walk into the classroom
to supervise “a close reading of Huckleberry Finn that will
reveal the various ways in which Twain undercuts Jim’s
humanity: in the minstrel routines with Huck as the ‘straight
man’; in generalities about Blacks as unreliable, primitive and
slow-witted. . .”
By examining one case in depth — Huckleberry Finn — Prose considers the
novel itself, ways it is taught, and the suggestions in one book of how to teach it.
Note that she might have brought in other examples, treating each briefly, but
focusing on one book allows her to examine the issue more closely.
Comparison and Contrast
A common pattern of development is comparison and contrast: juxtaposing two
things to highlight their similarities and differences. Writers use comparison and
contrast to analyze information carefully, which often reveals insights into the
nature of the information being analyzed. Comparison and contrast is often
required on examinations where you have to discuss the subtle differences or
similarities in the method, style, or purpose of two texts.
In the following excerpt from “Walking the Path between Worlds” (p. 300), Lori
Arviso Alvord compares and contrasts the landscape and culture of her home in
the Southwest with that of New England and Dartmouth College:
My memories of my arrival in Hanover, New Hampshire, are
mostly of the color green. Green cloaked the hillsides,
crawled up the ivied walls, and was reflected in the river
where the Dartmouth crew students sculled. For a girl who
had never been far from Crownpoint, New Mexico, the green
felt incredibly juicy, lush, beautiful, and threatening.
Crownpoint had had vast acreage of sky and sand, but aside
from the pastel scrub brush, mesquite, and chamiso,
practically the only growing things there were the tiny
stunted pines called pinion trees. Yet it is beautiful; you can
see the edges and contours of red earth stretching all the
way to the box shaped faraway cliffs and the horizon. No
horizon was in sight in Hanover, only trees. I felt
claustrophobic.
If the physical contrasts were striking, the cultural ones were
even more so. Although I felt lucky to be there, I was in
complete culture shock. I thought people talked too much,
laughed too loud, asked too many personal questions, and
had no respect for privacy. They seemed overly competitive
and put a higher value on material wealth than I was used to.
Navajos placed much more emphasis on a person’s relations
to family, clan, tribe, and the other inhabitants of the
earth,both human and nonhuman, than on possessions.
Everyone at home followed unwritten codes for behavior. We
were taught to be humble and not to draw attention to
ourselves, to favor cooperation over competition (so as not
to make ourselves “look better” at another’s expense or hurt
someone’s feelings), to value silence over words, to respect
 our elders, and to reserve our opinions until they were asked
for.
In the first paragraph, Arviso emphasizes the physical details of the landscape,
so her comparison and contrast relies on description. In the second paragraph,
she is more analytical as she examines the behavior. Although she does not
make a judgment directly, in both paragraphs she leads her readers to
understand her conclusion that her New Mexico home — the landscape and its
inhabitants — is what she prefers.
Comparisons and contrasts, whether as a full essay or a paragraph, can be
organized in two ways: subject-by-subject or point by point. In a subject by
subject analysis, the writer discusses all elements of one subject, then turns to
another. For instance, a comparison and contrast of two presidential candidates
by subject would present a full discussion of the first candidate, then the second
candidate. A point-by-point analysis is organized around the specific points of a
discussion. So, a point-by-point analysis of two presidential candidates might
discuss their education, then their experience, then the vision each has for the
country. Arviso uses point-by-point analysis as she first compares and contrasts
the landscapes and then the cultures of both places.
Classification and Division
It is important for readers as well as writers to be able to sort material or ideas
into major categories. By answering the question, “What goes together and
why?” writers and readers can make connections between things that might
otherwise seem unrelated. In some cases, the categories are ready-made, such
as single, married, divorced, or widowed. In other cases, you might be asked
either to analyze an essay that offers categories or to apply them. For instance,
you might classify the books you’re reading in class according to the categories
Francis Bacon defined: “Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be
swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Most of the time, a writer’s task is to develop his or her own categories, to find a
distinctive way of breaking down a larger idea or concept into parts. For example,
in “Politics and the English Language” (p. 529), George Orwell sets up categories
of imprecise and stale writing: “dying metaphors,” “operators of verbal false
limbs,” “pretentious diction,” and “meaningless words.” He explains each in a
paragraph with several examples and analysis. Classification and division is not
the organization for his entire essay, however, because he is making a larger
cause and-effect argument that sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking;
nevertheless, his classification scheme allows him to explore in a systematic way
what he sees as problems.
In Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue”(p.542) she classifies the “Englishes” she
speaks into categories of public and private spheres:
Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes
I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the
same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups.
The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my
book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well
enough, until I remembered one major difference that made
the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And
it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy
speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her.
I was saying things like “The intersection of memory upon
imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that related
to thusand-thus” — speech filled with carefully wrought
grammatical phrases, burdened,it suddenly seemed to me,
with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional
phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned
in school and through books, the forms of English I did not
use at home with my mother.
Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother,
and I again found myself conscious of the English I was
using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about
the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying
this: “Not waste money that way.” My husband was with us as
well, and he didn’t notice any switch in my Englishes. And
then I realized why. It’s because over the twenty years we’ve
been together I’ve often used that same kind of English with
him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become
our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that
related to family talk, the language I grew up with.
Tan does not start out by identifying two categories, but as she describes them
she classifies her “Englishes” as the English she learned in school and in books
and the language of intimacy she learned at home.
Definition
So many discussions depend upon definition. In examining the benefits of
attending an Ivy League school, for instance, we need to define Ivy League
before we can have a meaningful conversation. If we are evaluating a program’s
success, we must define what qualifies as success. Before we can determine
whether certain behavior is or is not patriotic, we must define the term. Ratings
systems for movies must carefully define violence. To ensure that writers and
their audiences are speaking the same language, definition may lay the
foundation to establish common ground or identifying areas of conflict.
Defining a term is often the first step in a debate or disagreement. In some
cases, definition is only a paragraph or two that clarify terms, but in other cases,
the purpose of an entire essay is to establish a definition. In Jane Howard’s
essay “In Search of the Good Family” (p. 283), she explores the meaning of
family, a common enough term, yet one she redefines. She opens by identifying
similar terms: “Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.” She
contrasts the traditional “blood family” with “new families . . . [that] consist of
friends of the road, ascribed by chance, or friends of the heart, achieved by
choice.” She develops her essay by first establishing the need we all have for a
network of “kin” who may or may not be blood relatives. Then she analyzes ten
characteristics that define a family.
Here is one:
Good families prize their rituals. Nothing welds a family more
than these. Rituals are vital especially for clans without
histories because they evoke a past, imply a future, and hint
at continuity. No line in the seder service at Passover
reassures more than the last: “Next year in Jerusalem!” A
clan becomes more of a clan each time it gathers to observe
a fixed ritual (Christmas, birthdays, Thanksgiving, and so on),
grieves at a funeral (anyone may come to most funerals;
those who do declare their tribalness), and devises a new rite
of its own. Equinox breakfasts can be at least as welding as
Memorial Day parades. Several of my colleagues and I used
to meet for lunch every Pearl Harbor Day, preferably to eat
some politically neutral fare like smorgasbord, to “forgive” our
only ancestrally Japanese friend, Irene Kubota Neves. For
that and other things we became, and remain, a sort of family.
Howard explains the purpose of rituals in her opening paragraph and then
provides specific examples to explain what she means by rituals. She offers such
a variety of them that her readers cannot fail to understand the flexibility and
openness she associates with her definition of family.
Cause and Effect
Analyzing the causes that lead to a certain effect or, conversely, the effects that
result from a cause is a powerful foundation for argument. Rachel Carson’s case
for the unintended and unexpected effects of the pesticide DDT in Silent Spring
is legendary (p. 798). Although she uses a number of different methods to
organize and develop her analysis, this simple — or not so simple — causal link
is the basis of everything that follows. On a similar topic, Terry Tempest Williams
in “The Clan of One-Breasted Women”(p. 816) proceeds from the effect she sees
— the breast cancer that has affected the women in her family — to argue that
the cause is environmental.
Since causal analysis depends upon crystal clear logic, it is important to carefully
trace a chain of cause and effect and to recognize possible contributing causes.
You don’t want to jump to the conclusion that there is only one cause or one
result, nor do you want to mistake an effect for an underlying cause. In “Letter
from Birmingham Jail” (p. 260), for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. points out that
his critics had mistaken a cause for an effect: the protests of the civil rights
movement were not the cause of violence but the effect of segregation.
Cause and effect is often signaled by a why in the title or the opening paragraph.
In “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read”(p. 89), Francine Prose sets out
what she believes are the causes for high school students’ lack of enthusiasm for
reading: “Given the dreariness with which literature is taught in many American
classrooms, it seems miraculous that any sentient teenager would view reading
as a source of pleasure.” In the following paragraph, she explains the positive
effects of reading classical literature:
Great novels can help us master the all-too-rare skill of
tolerating — of being able to hold in mind— ambiguity and
contradiction. Jay Gatsby has a shady past, but he’s also
sympathetic. HuckFinn is a liar, but we come to love him. A
friend’s student once wrote that Alice Munro’s characters
weren’t people he’d choose to hang out with but that reading
her work always made him feel “a little less petty and
judgmental.” Such benefits are denied to the young reader
exposed only to books with banal, simple-minded moral
equations as well as to the students encouraged to come up
with reductive, wrong-headed readings of multilayered texts.
In her analysis, Prose argues for the positive effects of reading canonical
literature, and she provides several examples. She concludes by pointing out that
teaching less challenging works, or teaching more challenging works without
acknowledging their complexity, has the effect of encouraging unclear or
superficial thinking.
*Adapted from The Language of Composition © 2019 Bedford, Freeman & Worth High School
Publishers