Writing a Spider Web

When it really comes down to it, it is extremely difficult to explain the typical American organization concept for an essay to a person who doesn’t seem to understand it. Trying to organize a paper can even be difficult for experienced writers in their own works, and when it comes to explaining it to a student whose paper has to be original and devised out of the tutee’s mind without taints of the tutor’s opinion, the task becomes extremely frustrating. I have had an experience with this when a student came in who needed help organizing his ideas on his topic. His assignment was to write an argumentative essay on the causes of the current financial situation. It was obvious at first that his essay contained no thesis, but as I continued through his paper, I realized that his essay was organized in a very odd, but innovative fashion. Instead of beginning each paragraph with reiterating the thesis and how the current point supports it, he would smoothly transition the previous paragraph’s topic into the next, like a sort of “trail of bread crumbs”, that led to his most important argument at the end of his work. It read wonderfully and made perfect sense once the conclusion was reached, but overall was unacceptable because the reader had no idea what the paper was really about until the end. It was difficult for me to reveal to him how that, although his paper was organized in a certain fashion that seemed correct to him, it was not done in the right way for an academic paper.
The main concept that I try to make students realize who have problems with organization is that the reader has to know exactly what each part of the essay is and how it connects to the overall big picture. What I mean by this is that, especially for a paper that will be read by an instructor, the first paragraph has to make clear what the pervasive theme of the work will be; the thesis has to be stated clearly so that it screams “I Am the Thesis” without actually saying it. Everything else in the essay then stems from the thesis itself. The next step is to tie each remaining point back to the thesis by blatantly declaring how it is supporting the main idea. There can be no ambiguity and the reader must be taken down a path that in normal conversation would be considered overly obvious. This will automatically make everything in the essay relevant to the big picture. Because everything has to somehow relate back to the main idea, everything that doesn’t either has to be modified or taken out completely. The most difficult part about teaching organization to a student, then, is getting the student to organize their own essay without imposing on them a preconceived notion from the tutor. The student needs to understand that the work is their own and their ideas of importance and “order” will not be the same as the tutor’s. Therefore, organization is a subjective term that relies on the individual’s beliefs of what is most relevant and what material should be used to support the main idea. The fact that sometimes the “thesis” isn’t always obvious is difficult as well, since the student and the tutor will have to comb back through the essay and define a notion that seems to have connections to everything else. Writing an academic essay is like a spider web, which contains ideas that spiral out, but always find their way back to the collective center eventually.