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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25850
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25850
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Remember that experiment you did back in grade school with the iron filings and the magnet. I think that is a good illustration of how a good piece of writing works. It is not that everything lines up neatly in rows and columns like a database or a spreadsheet. And it is not that all the elements are aligned in the same direction. It is that when you step back and look at the larger pattern, a structure emerges that forms a whole, a unity.

That is what you should be trying to achieve when you write. You may come at the same idea from different angles and with different techniques, but in the end it all flows together towards a central point of idea, like the iron filings, though they individually point in different directions, all forming part of a harmonious pattern around the head of the magnet, which, taken together, tells you something important about the nature of magnetic fields.

That what good writing is, a collection of ideas and images that cluster round a central point and illustrate its nature, its shape, and its importance.

Without that, a reader will get to the end of your post (if they get to the end) and not know what they have read. But they probably won't get to the end because they will sense long before that that these pieces are not aligning in any intelligible pattern and will stop reading.

And that is the other part of good structure in a text: it has to reveal itself progressively, not just at the end when all is finished, both because the reader will get bored if they do not see a structured developing, and because the reader cannot keep all the elements of a structure in their head as they read, waiting for it all to come together at the end.

This is a big part of the reason for the classical basic structure that says, first tell them what you are going to say, then say it, then tell them what you have said. It is all about making sure that the reader can see the structure emerging as they read.

In short, structure is essential.

Original score: 8