Give two writers the same claim and the same three pieces of evidence, and they can still produce arguments that feel nothing alike, because they put the pieces in a different order for different readers. A writer asking a skeptical city council for money opens with the cost and the savings; the same writer asking neighbors to show up at the council meeting opens with the cracked sidewalk everyone trips on. Unit 2 is about audience, and in reasoning and organization that means one question asked of every part of a passage: why is this here, at this point, for these readers?
Order is a decision about the audience
Topic 1.5 showed that a writer can state the thesis first or build toward it, and that you find a passage's line of reasoning with a paragraph map. The reason a writer picks one order over another is almost always the audience: what readers already believe when they start, and what they have to accept before the writer's claim will sound reasonable to them. (Judging whether a line of reasoning actually supports the thesis is Topic 3.5; how transitions and repeated terms make a text hold together is Topic 5.5.)
A useful way to read organization is to track the reader's state of mind paragraph by paragraph. At each point, ask what the writer assumes the reader now accepts. Arguments tend to start where the audience already is and move one step at a time toward where the writer wants them. That produces a few recurring arrangements.
- Common ground first. The writer opens with something the audience already values or agrees with (a shared memory, a value like fairness or thrift, praise for the readers' own experience), then shows that the claim follows from it. Readers who would resist a bare claim find it harder to reject one built on their own beliefs.
- Concession placed by the audience's hostility. For a hostile audience, a writer often grants the opposing view early, before any of their own evidence, so readers feel heard and keep reading. For a friendly audience, the objection can wait until late and be dispatched quickly.
- Strongest evidence first or last. Readers who are busy or expert get the strongest evidence up front, because they may stop reading. Readers who need to be led get the evidence in rising order, so the most striking case lands just before the claim it supports.
- Reason before feeling, or feeling before reason. An emotional story placed first makes readers care before they weigh anything. Placed after the facts, the same story confirms what the reader has already accepted, and is less likely to feel like manipulation to a suspicious audience.
None of these is a rule a writer must follow. They are the choices you explain. When an exam question asks why a writer delays the main claim, opens with a story, or answers an objection in the second paragraph, the strong answer names the audience and what the placement does to their resistance. "To create emphasis" explains nothing, because every placement emphasizes something.
Moves that bring a reader along
Inside the line of reasoning, writers use a handful of moves whose whole job is to get a particular audience from one step to the next. Exam questions ask about each of them with the stem "serves primarily to" or "functions chiefly to."
Comparisons and analogies. An analogy reasons from a case the audience already understands to a case they don't: if you would judge the familiar case this way, you should judge the new one the same way. Its force comes from the audience, so writers choose comparisons from their readers' own lives. A doctor speaking to farmers compares a fever to a smoking haystack; the same doctor speaking to engineers compares it to an overheating boiler. When you explain an analogy, name the judgment it carries over ("it applies to X the caution readers already show toward Y") and why that source suits this audience. An analogy persuades only as far as the two cases match, and writers sometimes concede where they don't.
Rhetorical questions. A rhetorical question is asked for its effect rather than for an answer, and its effect depends on where it sits. At the opening, a question names a problem and makes the reader want the answer. In the middle, it often voices the reader's own objection ("But who will pay for it?") so the writer can answer it next, which shows the writer has anticipated the doubt. At the end, a question can leave readers to supply the conclusion themselves, which feels more like their own idea than a stated claim would. Read the sentence after the question: whatever the writer does next tells you what the question was for.
Definitions. When an argument turns on a word readers might understand differently ("public," "waste," "safe"), a writer may stop to define it. A definition can clear up confusion, but in an argument it often does more: it sets the terms so that the writer's conclusion follows. A writer who defines a park as "land a city holds in trust for people who own no land" has already half-argued that the park should not be sold to a developer.
The test for all three is the one from Topic 1.5: imagine the move removed and ask what this audience would no longer accept or understand.
Openings and endings
The first paragraph of an argument does setup work for a particular reader. It can establish common ground, present the problem, earn the writer's credibility, or create curiosity by withholding something the reader wants to know. Which of those jobs it does depends on what this audience lacks. Readers who already care about an issue need no hook; readers who have never thought about it need a reason to keep going.
Sometimes the opening includes a thesis that also forecasts the structure, as in "The ordinance should be repealed because it is unenforceable, unfair to renters, and unnecessary." A forecast tells you the order of the body before you read it, and it lets you check whether each paragraph delivers what was promised. Topic 2.3 covers how to find the thesis itself, including a thesis the writer never states outright.
The last paragraph is where an argument lands, and questions ask about its "effect" or "effectiveness." Endings usually do one of four things: they ask the audience to act, they return to an image or story from the opening so the reader sees it differently now (a frame), they widen the claim to a larger principle, or they answer the last remaining doubt. When the thesis is implied rather than stated, the ending is often the best place to find it, because it is where every earlier step was heading.
Worked examples
A student wants the town library to lend power tools (drills, ladders, tile saws) the way it lends books. She plans two pieces: a short speech to the town council, which has to approve the money, and a post in a neighborhood group, asking people to come to the council meeting. Her material: (a) a story about her family buying a tile saw for one bathroom repair and never using it again, (b) the cost estimate from a nearby town's tool library, (c) the objection that borrowed tools will be broken or stolen, and the answer that the nearby town requires a deposit and reports few losses.
For each audience, explain an effective order and why.
Show solution
Council. Lead with (b) and (c). Council members are deciding whether to spend public money, so their first questions are cost and risk. Opening with the estimate answers the cost question at once; raising the theft objection early and answering it with the deposit system removes the most likely reason to vote no before it hardens. The family story belongs last and short, as a concrete case of what residents would gain, because a council that hears an anecdote first may suspect the proposal has nothing more solid behind it.
Neighbors. Lead with (a). Neighbors don't control the budget and don't need to be argued out of anything; they need a reason to give up an evening. The tile-saw story is a situation many of them recognize, so it makes the idea feel like their own problem. The cost figure comes next and briefly, as reassurance that the plan is realistic. The objection about theft can be one sentence, or left out, since this audience isn't raising it.
This paragraph comes from a letter a fire department sent to residents of one street.
(1) Every October our crews visit the homes on Linden Street, and every October we find smoke alarms on the ceilings and their batteries in the kitchen drawers. (2) Why would anyone disarm the one device that exists to make noise at the worst moment? (3) Because it makes noise at the worst moment: a pan of bacon sets it off, and the drawer is the fastest way to silence it. (4) An alarm without its battery is a door with the key left in the lock, which looks like protection and provides none. (5) So this year we are not asking you to buy anything. (6) We are asking you to move the alarm nearest your kitchen six feet down the hall, where cooking smoke won't reach it and a real fire's smoke will.
Explain what sentences 2-3 and sentence 4 each do, and why the request in sentence 6 is so small.
Show solution
Sentences 2-3. The question voices the puzzle a reader might have about other people, then the answer reveals that the reader probably did the same thing for an understandable reason. The effect is to explain the behavior without blaming the residents, so readers who took their own battery out don't get defensive before the request arrives.
Sentence 4. The analogy carries over a judgment the audience already holds: everyone knows a key left in the lock makes a locked door pointless. Applied to the alarm, it shows that a disarmed alarm isn't merely useless but falsely reassuring. The comparison comes from homeowners' everyday lives, which is why it works for this audience.
Sentence 6. The paragraph has just shown that residents disarm alarms because of a real nuisance, so a request to "stop doing that" would fail. The request solves the nuisance itself, costs nothing ("not asking you to buy anything"), and takes a minute. The order of the paragraph (problem, sympathetic explanation, stakes, easy fix) is designed so that by the last sentence the reader has no reason left to say no.
The following passage was written for this lesson. It imitates a bulletin that a young county agricultural agent of the 1910s might have mailed to the farmers of his county.
I have farmed for nine years, which is to say that most of you had planted more corn than I will ever see before I knew which end of a planter goes first. I do not write to tell you how to farm. I write about one hour's work in March that I believe pays better than any other hour of the year.
Last spring Mr. Ostrander of Bell Township, whose seed is reckoned as good as any in the county, let me take one ear from every tenth row of his crib. I set six kernels from each ear in a box of damp sawdust beside his kitchen stove. After a week, nineteen ears in a hundred had sent up nothing, or a shoot too weak to stand. Every one of those ears looked as sound as its neighbors.
What does a dead ear cost? Planted, it fills a length of row with nothing, and the cultivator passes over that length as faithfully as over the rest. No man here would buy a team of horses without looking at their teeth and watching them pull. Yet each spring we trust a year's harvest to seed whose only test has been our eye.
The sawdust box costs nothing but boards you already own. I will come to any farm in the county in March to show how one is set up, and Mr. Ostrander has offered his kitchen to anyone who wants to see his working.
Question 1. The first paragraph primarily serves to
- (A) establish the writer as an authority on growing corn
- (B) acknowledge the readers' greater experience so that the advice that follows will not seem presumptuous
- (C) introduce the cost of the testing method the writer recommends
- (D) state the thesis that untested seed is the main cause of poor harvests
Question 2. The writer's choice to test Mr. Ostrander's seed, rather than an ordinary farmer's, is effective chiefly because
- (A) it suggests that if even highly regarded seed contains dead ears, the readers' seed probably does too
- (B) it shows that Mr. Ostrander is a careless farmer whose methods should not be copied
- (C) it allows the writer to thank a prominent supporter of the bulletin
- (D) it proves that seed from Bell Township is worse than seed from the rest of the county
Question 3. The comparison to buying a team of horses (third paragraph) functions mainly to
- (A) suggest that farmers spend too much money on livestock
- (B) apply to seed corn a standard of caution the readers already follow in another purchase
- (C) provide a second piece of evidence from Mr. Ostrander's farm
- (D) concede that the seed test is less reliable than an inspection of horses
Show solution
1. (B). The writer is less experienced than his readers, and he says so with humor ("before I knew which end of a planter goes first") and with a disclaimer ("I do not write to tell you how to farm"). Farmers who might resent advice from a young agent are disarmed before the advice arrives. That is common ground built for a resistant audience. (A) is the trap: an agent might be expected to establish authority, but this paragraph does the opposite and gives up any claim to know more about farming than his readers. (C) is wrong because the first paragraph mentions no cost at all; the cost of the sawdust test comes up only in the last paragraph. (D) overstates: the paragraph makes no claim about causes of poor harvests.
2. (A). The audience's likely objection is "my seed is fine." By testing seed the county already considers among its best, the writer makes the nineteen-in-a-hundred result apply to everyone: if Ostrander's seed fails that often, theirs probably does as well. The choice of evidence is aimed at this audience's confidence. (B) contradicts the passage: Ostrander's seed is "reckoned as good as any," and he later offers his kitchen, which shows him as an ally. (C) invents a role the passage never mentions. (D) misreads the logic: one test of one crib proves nothing about the township.
3. (B). Every reader inspects a horse before buying one; the comparison shows that trusting seed by its looks is a lapse in the same care they already practice. Notice how the paragraph is built: a rhetorical question ("What does a dead ear cost?") turns from the evidence to the stakes, the analogy makes those stakes feel like common sense, and "Yet" lands the contrast. (C) is wrong because the analogy is a comparison, not new data. (D) reverses the point: the comparison argues for testing, conceding nothing.
The method across all three. In each question, the right answer explains the part by what it does to these readers: experienced farmers proud of their seed. Choices that describe the part without the audience, or that misstate whose side the writer is on, are the distractors.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Multiple-choice reading questions on this skill use stems such as "The first paragraph primarily serves to," "The rhetorical question in line ... functions to," "The comparison ... chiefly serves to," "The writer most likely includes ... in order to," and "The effectiveness of the final paragraph results primarily from." For each, the answer is a function stated in relation to the audience and the rest of the argument. In the rhetorical analysis essay, explaining why a writer arranged the speech or letter as they did for the audience named in the prompt is the kind of commentary that moves an essay into the top range of the evidence-and-commentary row. Commentary that follows the passage paragraph by paragraph, summarizing each one without saying what it does for that audience, does not earn that range.
Check yourself
Question 1
A principal writes to parents, most of whom oppose her plan to start school 45 minutes later. Her letter answers their main objection (the effect on after-school jobs and sports) in the second paragraph, before she presents any research on sleep. Which explanation of that placement is strongest?
- A
The objection is less important than the research, so it should come first and be dealt with quickly.
- B
Parents who feel their concern has been heard early are more likely to give the research a fair reading.
- C
Letters to parents conventionally address objections in the second paragraph.
- D
Placing the objection early emphasizes it.
Show answer
B
The placement makes sense because of who the readers are: an opposed audience reads evidence defensively until its objection is acknowledged, so answering it first lowers resistance to everything after. Choice D is the tempting one, but "emphasizes it" would explain any placement and says nothing about these readers.
- A
Question 2
An essay urging a town to keep its only covered bridge closes with the question "When the last of our grandparents' work is gone, what will we point to and say that we made it last?" What does the question most likely do?
- A
It asks readers for suggestions about other structures worth preserving.
- B
It admits that the writer is unsure whether the bridge is worth saving.
- C
It leaves readers to supply the conclusion that the bridge must be kept, so the claim feels like their own.
- D
It introduces a new argument that the essay will develop in a later section.
Show answer
C
A rhetorical question at the end of an argument expects no answer and implies only one: here, that nothing will be left unless the bridge is saved. Choice A treats it as a real request for information, which is the usual misreading.
- A
Question 3
In a letter opposing the sale of a city's riverside lot to a hotel developer, a writer stops to define a park as "land a city keeps for the people who own no land of their own." Explain how this definition works in the argument.
Show answer
It sets the terms so the writer's conclusion follows: if a park exists for people who own no land, then selling it to a private company betrays its purpose, and the definition does that arguing before the writer states the claim.
A definition in an argument usually does more than clarify a word. Its function is to make the writer's conclusion seem to follow from the meaning of a term the reader has just accepted.
Question 4
A writer arguing for a citywide ban on leaf blowers addresses one essay to the city's landscaping companies and another to residents who complain about noise. In which essay is the writer more likely to place the strongest evidence and the answer to the main objection near the beginning, and why?
- A
The residents' essay, because they already agree and want the evidence first.
- B
The landscapers' essay, because a resistant audience needs its objection answered before it will consider the rest.
- C
The residents' essay, because an emotional audience needs facts before stories.
- D
Neither, because the strongest evidence always belongs at the end.
Show answer
B
The landscapers stand to lose money and will reject the claim unless their cost objection is met early. Choice D states a rule that doesn't exist: the place of the strongest evidence depends on how resistant and how busy the audience is.
- A