Reading and Writing in Chronological Order
Much of the text and writing you'll do occurs in chronological order. This means that the events in a story happen in order from beginning to end. Writing in chronological order helps the reader follow what is happening in a story. For example, if a student wants to prepare for an exam, she will first go to class, then study, and finally, take the exam. These events all happen in an order the reader knows.
In this section, you will learn how to use context clues, prediction, and prior knowledge to help figure out the chronological order of a text.
- Context Clues: Look at a text and see what words are used. Nouns and pronouns can be context dues that help you see the order of sentences. As you learned in Unit 1, a noun needs to be defined before a pronoun can be used. Take this sentence, for example: Anna needed to pick up the car before noon, so she hurried to finish her work. Anna needs to come first to tell us who "she" and "her refers to. If you see a pronoun in a text, make sure the noun it refers to comes first.
- Prediction: Use the predicting skills you practice in Unit 2 to help understand chronological order. Using the earlier example, if a text tells us Anna needs to go to work in the morning and pick up the car by noon, we know work will come first, and the car will come second.
- Brainstorming: Think about what you already know about an event In Unit 4, you'll write about your daily routine. You already know how most people will order their day: first wake up, second eat breakfast, third go to work or school, and so on. By thinking through the order as you already know it, you can understand the chronological order of events in a text
As you learned in Unit 2, we use specific words called transitions or connectors to show the chronological order or sequence of events in a text. These transitions are commonly used when giving instructions, and maybe you already noticed them used in the course. Some examples are first, second, next, then, or finally. They help to organize the text in a logical way for the reader.
Complete this activity:
Sometimes a text will use reverse chronological order, or go backwards. If you already know the chronological order that should occur, you'll have an easier time understanding the reading. Knowing the usual chronological order of events is also helpful if a text jumps around or moves out of order When we understand the order things usually occur, we can better comprehend, or understand, a text.
In our own writing, we can often assume that the reader will know the correct chronological order of our events. If we jump around too much, we could confuse the reader and make our writing hard to understand. By thinking through the events we want to use and what order describes them the best, we can help our readers follow our writing easily.
Read the following story and answer the questions that follow. Remember to use context dues or a dictionary to help you learn any new words you see.
One day Nasreddin went to town to buy new clothes. First he tried on a
pair of trousers. He didn't like the trousers, so he gave them back to
the shopkeeper. Then he tried a robe which had the same price as the
trousers. Nasreddin was pleased with the robe, and he left the shop.
Before he climbed on his donkey to ride home, the shopkeeper and the
shop-assistant ran out.
"You didn't pay for the robe!" said the shopkeeper.
"But I gave you the trousers in exchange for the robe, didn't I?" replied Nasreddin.
"Yes, but you didn't pay for the trousers, either!" said the shopkeeper.
"But I didn't buy the trousers," replied Nasreddin. "I am not so stupid as to pay for something which I never bought".
Source:
Text from Saylor Academy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Activity from Toronto Catholic District School Board, https://h5pstudio.ecampusontario.ca/content/20833
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Nadreddin story from University of Victoria English Language Center, http://web.archive.org/web/20200925205049/https://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/courses/elc/studyzone/330/reading/shop1.htm This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.