Order

As promised, from Michel Foucault's The Order of Things:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered as I read the passsage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

We discussed this idea a bit today, but I'm interested in what, for you, registers as an "ordered" essay. How do you know it when you see it? What, in the end, do you mean by "flow"? More specifically, and considering the discussion we had today about how sometimes there is an order that is simply not apparent, how do you deal with students who seem to have problems with order in their writing?