Text Structure

What is text structure? How the information in a text is organized

Why study text structure? Knowledge of text structure helps you: find the main ideas and supporting details in a text anticipate what’s to come and make predictions read actively increase your comprehension organize the information that you’ve learned in a useable way

Why study text structure? “While most pieces of fiction follow the same or similar general organizational patterns, different expository texts can have very different text structures.” from: http://www.nea.org/tools/using-text-structure.html

Types of Text Structures Including, but not limited to: Sequence Description Cause/Effect Problem/Solution Compare/Contrast

Why study text structure? When you can identify the text structure, you can identify an appropriate tool for organizing the information that you learn.

A note about text structure… Right now we’re going to look at texts that use just one text structure at a time, but some more difficult pieces that you encounter in other classes may use more than one text structure. For example, your history book may use sequence to explain the order of events in the American Revolution, but then shift to compare/contrast to explain differences between the colonists’ perspective and that of the British.