Analysing How Non-Fiction Develops Ideas: Says/Does Outlines, Arrangement and Framing

Hook: same ingredients, different meal

Give two writers the same facts and they will produce different essays. One opens with a statistic and marches through reasons. Another opens with a father in his pyjamas flooding a rink at midnight and does not say what the essay is about until paragraph 4. Both may be excellent. But they make the reader experience the idea differently.

The curriculum asks you to analyse how the aspects of a text, especially its structure, contribute to the ideas, issues and themes it develops. Analysis means explaining how and why, not only what.

A text to practise on

The Rink on Maple Street

(A personal essay written for this website.)

(1) The year I turned seven, my father flooded the rink behind the community centre at eleven o'clock at night, in a parka over his pyjamas, because the forecast said minus twenty and he did not want to waste the cold. I held the flashlight. The water steamed in the dark and froze in long grey ribbons.

(2) For the next ten winters, that rink was where our street happened. The retired teacher from number 14 skated slow laps with her hands behind her back. Teenagers who would not say hello to anyone in July passed the puck to eight-year-olds. Nobody organized it. The ice did.

(3) Last winter the rink opened in late January. When I was small it opened before the winter break. There were two thaws in February, and the volunteers, most of them older now, flooded it three times and then gave up. On the warmest Saturday, I walked past and saw a sign taped to the boards: CLOSED: SLUSH.

(4) It would be easy to tell this as a story about weather. But what I lost last winter was not ice. It was the one place on our street where people who had nothing else in common spent an evening together without having to plan it. A community, I have come to think, is not only the people in it; it is the places that make meeting easy, and those places can disappear quietly, one short season at a time.

(5) This winter my father is seventy. He still checks the forecast every night in December. When it finally says minus twenty, I will hold the hose, and he will hold the flashlight.

Tool 1: the says/does outline

For each paragraph, write two short notes:

• Says: the content, in a few words.
• Does: the function: introduces, illustrates, concedes, turns, defines, states the thesis, returns to the frame.

The does column is where analysis starts. It forces you to think about why a paragraph is where it is.

Tool 2: arrangement

• Deductive: thesis first. Clear and efficient; common in reports, editorials and academic writing.
• Inductive: evidence and examples first, thesis late. The reader reaches the idea alongside the writer, which can make it feel discovered rather than imposed. Common in personal essays and in writing for skeptical audiences.
• Frame: an opening image returns at the end, changed by everything in between.

A famous example of an opening that frames everything after it (though it does not return at the end) is the first chapter of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), A Fable for Tomorrow. It describes an imagined town where life slowly falls silent, then admits that the town does not exist, while warning that each of the harms described had already happened somewhere. The invented town makes a scattered, technical problem feel like one story before the scientific chapters begin.