Structure in writing:
an introduction

Finding text structures
Finding knowledge structures
Symbols of knowledge structures
Exercise: mapping
Exercise: writing from maps
Example: salmon extinction
Original text
Scanning for key words
Making an outline
Highlighting structure words
Semantic mapping

 

Lawrie Hunter

Kochi University of Technology
lawrie@info.kochi-tech.ac.jp

Example: salmon extinction

The article about salmon extinction comes from the
Daily Yomiuri newspaper. It's not a long piece of writing,
but it has a lot of information in it.
Look at the original text.

There are many ways to look at a piece of writing,
and there are some ways that will suit your way of thinking.

Before we read, of course, we should scan and find key words.

For looking at text structure, outline form is useful.

It is very useful to find the structure words in a piece of text.
Remember, though, that there are two kinds of structures,
and two kinds of structure words:

-text structure
-knowledge structure

When we try to find knowledge structure,
it's good to make a semantic map.
Often we think a piece of writing has
just one information structure, but this is often not true:

Many writers do not use one large structure for their writing.
There are many ways of mapping a piece of writing,
and usually more than one way of mapping is good.

Back to Hunter's homepage