(this is a difficult and in-depth section. If you have limited time to prepare, skip to Section F: Don't read, skim).

The GRE essays are organized using a variety of structures. If you identify the structures, you can more easily identify the author's point. In this section, we go through five forms of essay structure that you are likely to encounter.

1. Chronological Pattern

When the focus of a text is a change, a transformation, or a sequence of actions unfolding over time, then chronological order is the pattern of choice for that text. Consider the following sentence:

When the plague entered northern France in July, 1348, it settled first in Normandy and, checked by winter, gave Picardy a deceptive interim until the next summer.

The sentence emphasizes the interruption in the spread of plague, a concept linked to chronology. The plague entered Northern France in July, 1348, settled first in Normandy, was checked by winter, and gave Picardy a deceptive interim until the next summer.

2. Spatial Pattern

This pattern organizes information by location, orientation or configuration.

Consider the following passage:

     But if the Romans couldn't, or didn't care to, conquer the Germans, the latter equally could not then conquer the Romans. The standoff deflected German expansion toward the east; by the third century it had pushed as far as the Dnieper. Stretching now from the North Sea to southern Russia and from Scandinavia to the Roman frontier, Common Germanic inevitably evolved from a fairly uniform tongue into three distinct, though still closely related, languages.
     North Germanic (ancestor of the Scandinavian tongues) covered most of Norway and Sweden; East Germanic (which included Gothic and several other extinct dialects) covered Eastern Europe and southern Russia. West Germanic, ancestor of all the other modern Germanic tongues, including English, was spoken from the coasts of the North Sea and western Baltic south to the Roman frontier.

     Note the prevalence of phrases that denote geographic expansion of the Germans or their containment in territories held by the Romans. Note also the predictability of this passage: it describes the north-south and the east-west boundaries of the spread of the German languages (the geographic whole) and then differentiates three parts of the whole according to directions: the Far North, the east, and the west. Here, the spatial pattern is in service: the author states a relationship, in this case, a correspondence between geographic and linguistic expansion.

3. Hierarchical Pattern

Passages organized by hierarchy, a ranked series, create an order where no natural relationship (such as chronological or spatial relationship) exists. For example, if no natural chronological or spatial characteristic is a critical aspect of the matter described, then the text may designate a grouping according to a system of some sort.

Like chronological and spatial order, a hierarchical pattern moves in a linear direction, and for this reason, it creates a pattern of expectation for the reader. Once you have identified the principle of order (for example, lesser to greater, least familiar to most familiar, colder to hotter), you can anticipate and assimilate later information and understand the general framework. Consider the working out of a hierarchy in support of a thesis in this passage:

Because of their extravagance, violence, and vainglory, tournaments were continually being denounced by popes and kings, from whom they drained money. This was in vain. When the Dominicans denounced them as a pagan circus, no one listened. When the formidable St. Bernard thundered that anyone killed in a tournament would go to Hell, he spoke for once to deaf ears. Death in a tournament was officially considered the sin of suicide by the Church, besides jeopardizing family and tenantry without cause, but even threats of excommunication had no effect.

According to the thesis, the denunciation of tournaments by popes and kings failed.
The Dominicans denounced them, but no one listened; St. Bernard thundered but spoke to deaf ears; the Church threatened excommunication, to no effect. You perceive a hierarchical order in the increasing degree of severity of these denunciations, and that regularity gives pattern to the passage.

4. General-to-Specific Pattern

This pattern is especially useful in argumentation. Argumentative writing makes a general argument, develops it by a grouping of specific examples that give evidence for the claim, and concludes by restating the general argument.

Here is the pattern:

• General Statement, followed by
• evidence
• evidence
• more evidence      

Consider the following passage:

Throughout the seventeenth century, the French medical profession had what we should call a thoroughly bad press; Moliere [a satiric dramatist] conferred upon its members an inglorious morality, the satirists did their worst with them, and, in private correspondence, the physician was almost always presented as a cross between a murderer and a buffoon.

This passage starts with a general claim of the widespread negative view of the medical profession in France in the 17th century. The general claim rests on three factual pieces of evidence that are stated after the initial claim: Moliere attacked the profession in his farces; satirists savagely attacked it; persons in private life attacked it.

5. Specific-to-General Pattern

The specific-to-general pattern presents a series of related examples whose relationship is unclear until the passage draws them to a conclusion or general claim.

Here is the pattern:

• example
• example
• example
• General statement

Consider this passage:

Frogs react quickly and effectively to bugs that fly past them. This by no means implies that they have a concept of bug. Indeed, we can be pretty sure that they do not, or at best, that their concept of bug both under- and over-generalizes to a rather gross extent. For instance, they will overgeneralize by snapping at bug-sized pellets that are flipped past them, but will undergeneralize by totally ignoring motionless bugs even when no other food source is available. The most parsimonious explanation of their behavior is that networks of cells that respond to rapid movement and small rounded objects are directly linked to the snapping reflex and that there is nothing more sophisticated than this inside the frog's brain.

In this passage, statements that describe behavior of frogs in certain instances are the categories: frogs react quickly and effectively to bugs, they snap at bug-size pellets, they totally ignore motionless bugs. The general claim that accounts for all these specific behaviors is phrased at the end of the paragraph.

• F. Don't read, skim