Chronological order presents ideas according to the time in which they occurred.

This type of organization is especially effective if you are describing a process, relaying a series of actions, or telling a story. For instance, to convey the plot of a novel or the procedures of an experiment, you would tell readers what happened first, second, etc. Chronological order is a sequence of events arranged in their order of occurrence in time, such as a timeline. It is a sorting of dates from oldest to newest Chronological order is when you are looking at or needing to put things in the exact order that they occurred. In composition, a method of organization in which actions or events are presented as they occur (or occurred) in time. Narratives and process analysis essays commonly rely on chronological order.

EXAMPLE: "Early next morning I was lying in bed, when an old gentleman riding a bay horse arrived at the river. He was dressed in a faded chocolate gown flecked with roses and the end of his turban was wrapped round his face over an iron-grey beard. Across the saddle he carried a brown lamb. Behind him, on foot, came his son aged twelve, flapping along in a gown of geranium red and a white turban as big as himself, and holding a stick with which he directed the progress of a black ewe and her black lamb. "When the party had assembled at the ford, the process of crossing began. First the old man rode into the stream, with difficulty kept his horse's head against it, and deposited the brown lamb on the other side. While he was returning, the child caught the black lamb. This he gave to his father, who then reentered the water dangling it by one leg so that it screamed. Bleating in sympathy, the ewe followed. But the current swept her away and landed her on the bank she had started from. Meanwhile her offspring, now safe on the further bank with the brown lamb, kept on crying. Again the old man returned, and helped his son drive the wet and shivering ewe a hundred yards up the bank above the ford. There the current caught her once more, and landed her neatly at the ford itself, this time on the further side, where she was warmly greeted by both lambs. Putting his foot on his father's boot, the little boy hopped up behind him and probed the stream with his pole as they crossed, to see if the bottom was firm. On the other bank he dismounted, restored the brown lamb to his father's saddle, set the ewe and the black lamb in motion, and launched into a swinging trot, with his geranium gown flying out behind him. The bay horse followed, and the process was lost on the horizon." (Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana. Jonathan Cape, 1937)

"In any kind of narration, the simplest approach is to set down events in chronological order, the way they happened. To do so is to have your story already organized for you. A chronological order is therefore an excellent sequence to follow unless you can see some special advantage in violating it." (X.J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy, and Jane E. Aaron, The Bedford Reader, 7th ed. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000)

Chronological Order in a Process Analysis "How to Boil an Egg Like a Pro "Put your eggs in a saucepan and cover them with about one-half inch cold water. Heat the pan until the water is simmering and cook like this for seven minutes, using a timer. As soon as the timer dings put the saucepan into the sink and turn on the cold tap, allowing the water to overspill. It doesn't need to be galloping; a steady but vigorous flow will do. After a minute turn off the tap and leave the eggs in the cold water for another couple of minutes, or until they are cold enough to hold comfortably. "When time's up your eggs will be cooked, and with no soft center remaining." (Bunty Cutler, 211 Things a Clever Girl Can Do. Perigee, 2008) "When the steps in the process must be performed in a particular order, details are arranged in a chronological (or time) order. To help your reader follow the chronological order, transitions like these can help:

First, you must . . . Next, be careful to . . . Now, you can . . . After that , try . . . Finally, you should . . .

spatial order In composition, a method of organization in which details are presented as they are (or were) located in space--such as, from left to right or from top to bottom. Descriptions of places and objects commonly rely on spatial order. Spatial order is the pattern that tells you where things are physical positioned, for example my bed is to the east of my room my dresser is to the west of my room. EXAMPLE: "Our new home was one of a number of wooden single-story units huddled together in a horseshoe enclosing a courtyard. Our new apartment was toward the rear center of the horseshoe, away from the entrance to the courtyard. To reach the kitchen, one had to pass through a small windowless anteroom made of loosely arranged planks. Anybody inside could easily look through the chinks without being observed. Against the wall opposite the entrance to the kitchen was a large stove, which took up about one fifth of the room. Right next to the stove was a bench with a bucket of water resting on it. Past the bench, in the middle of the wall, was a door leading to the only other room. To the right of the door stood a cupboard for pots, dishes, and food. Next to the cupboard, leaning against the wall on the right, was old Helena's bed. The kitchen was too small to accommodate another bed. There was just enough room for a table and chairs, which had to be placed next to the kitchen window. It was a strategic window, affording a view of the entire courtyard." (Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood. Oxford Univ. Press, 1984)

"Far to his left, in the northeast, beyond the valley and the terraced foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, rose clear and magnificent into the sunset. Nearer, perhaps ten miles distant, and on a lower level than the main valley, he made out the village of Tomaln, nestling behind the jungle, from which rose a thin blue scarf of illegal smoke, someone burning wood for carbon. Before him, on the other side of the American highway, spread fields and groves, through which meandered a river, and the Alcapancingo road." (Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947)

"The loach, in its general aspect, has a pellucid appearance: its back is mottled with irregular collections of small black dots, not reaching much below the line lateral is, as are the black and tail fins: a black line runs from each eye down to the nose; its belly is of a silvery white; the upper jaw projects beyond the lower, and is surrounded with six feelers, three on each side: its pectoral fins are large, its ventral much smaller; the fin behind its anus small; its dorsal fin large, containing eight spines; its tail, where it joins to the tailfin, remarkably broad, without any tameness, so as to be characteristic of this genus: the tail-fin is broad, and square at the end. From the breadth and muscular strength of the tail it appears to be an active nimble fish." (Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, 1789)

CLIMACTIC ORDER In writing, there are patterns of organization as to how a writer will "grab" the reader to lead her to the end of an idea. One type is "climactic order", in which the most important idea is saved for last. So, the writer starts a segment with the least important set of ideas or facts and continues to the end-the climax. Its when a writer organizes events, ideas, or plot points in an order that starts out with least important parts of the story and ends in a "climax" which is he most important part of the story. In a narrative (within an essay, short story, novel, or play), the turning point in the action (also known as the crisis) and/or the highest point of interest or excitement. Adjective:climactic. In its simplest form, the classical structure of a narrative can be described as rising action, climax, falling action--known in journalism as BME (beginning, middle, end).

EXAMPLE: "It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent. Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral stature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind; and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most frightful bondage, under which they have been groaning for centuries!" (Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 1845)

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. *"The essay, unlike the article, is inconclusive. It plays with ideas, juxtaposing them, trying them out, discarding some ideas on the way, following others to their logical conclusion. In the celebrated climax of his essay on cannibalism, Montaigne forces himself to admit that had he himself grown up among cannibals, he would in all likelihood have become a cannibal himself." (Thomas H. Eriksen, Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Berg Publishers, 2006)

*"Anecdotes are really miniature stories with all the appurtenances of same. They must lay the groundwork so the reader can follow the action. They must introduce characters with clear objectives, then show the characters striving toward those objectives. They usually have conflict. They move toward a climax, then usually have a denouement, just like a short story. And they have to be structured; the raw material from which they're built is seldom in final form when you get it. Warning: 'Structuring' does not mean changing facts, it means perhaps rearranging their order, cutting nonessentials, emphasizing the quotes or actions that drive home the point." (Andr Fontaine and William A. Glavin, The Art of Writing Nonfiction, 2nd ed. Syracuse Univ. Press, 1991)