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Get Your Articles Published: Structure

by Lesley Bown and Ann Gawthorpe

An article needs an underlying structure to give it coherence – this is what leads the reader through your sequence of ideas and leaves them feeling satisfied. Usually it will seem quite obvious from looking at the material which structure is the most appropriate. Here are the most common ones – bear in mind that sometimes you can combine two, such as ‘chronological’ building to a ‘climax’.

Reader’s interest – this is the default structure, it answers the questions that the reader would ask.
Repetition – a series of points of increasing weight.
Chronological – telling a story in the order it happened.
Sequential – practical order, used for how-to articles.
Climax – building to a dramatic conclusion.
Reverse – starting with the conclusion followed by explanation
Logical – a problem followed by its solution.
News type – or pyramid shape. Put the most important items first in brief, then go on to explain in more detail. This is not often used in article writing.

If you can’t decide which structure to use, make a list of headings, each one describing one of the main points you need to make. It may be that you need to remove one or more, or add others, to achieve a more coherent structure.

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