In the last module we talked about how we need to think about our readers when creating a text. Our minds aren’t tidy. Thoughts and ideas float up and disappear again. The text can’t be like our minds. It needs to be tidy, so that the reader can follow our train of thoughts. To help with this we sort our text in genres, as we talked about in the last module. Within the text we have two ways of sorting the parts of the text: chronologically (in the order that they happened) or thematically (elements that belong together because they are about the same topic).
In this module we will especially practice for writing a report. A report can be very simple or very complicated. It can be half a page entry in a log, or it can be a 300 pages political document. If you know how to write a good report, you can learn to write almost everything.
 

Chronological order

We learnt about structuring a text in the order that everything happened when we were children and listened to the fairy tales. Fairy tales and children’s books tell the story in the order that events happen. We can use this technique when we write about incidents. Describing elements (like incidents or comments) in the order they appeared is the easiest way to structure a text. Examples from our work life where we write chronological texts, are reports and minutes from meetings.
Reports and minutes from meetings aren’t exactly like fairy tales, of course. They have a formal structure where more than one principle for structure is used. But let’s start easy.
 

But chronological order isn’t as easy as that. If you paid close attention, you noticed that one element appears in the “wrong place”. The fawlty switch was broken before all the incidents described in this report. But It wasn’t brought into the writer’s attention before the fire. Often it is like that. We learn about the consequences or effects before we learn about the cause. Here the fawlty switch is the cause and the fire is the consequence.
The effect or consequence always occurs after the cause, but we need to be very aware that chronological order is not enough to decide casualty.
An example: “It started to rain; the children ran into the school building.” Maybe the children ran inside to avoid getting wet, maybe it was just the end of their break. We need to investigate more to be sure. When we write we often start with the consequence followed by the cause and joined with a “because”, like this: “The children ran into the school because it started to rain”. Now the reader knows that the running was the consequence of the rain.

Now that we have practiced chronology and causality, we advance one step further and look at the formal structure of a report.
We will use the fire incident as an example. It’s the next day, and the manager takes time to write a more formal report.

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Another type of text that has a very clear structure is the resume. When we present ourselves and our experience, we group together types of information, like personal, education and work. Then we use chronology within the group. Read the example below