Structure and Purpose
How the author orders his comments, how the thought flows from the first idea to the final idea, how the ideas evolve and are presented to the reader, all these indicate the structure of the piece, a structure that supports the author's purpose.
Suppose the author wants to show the importance of an incident in his early life. The structure that best supports a piece of this nature will begin in the present, move to the past time, and return to the present to show the effects of the incident in later life. This is one type of chronology.
Another chronological structure begins at the beginning, early in the story, and moves to the end, the latest time cited. The novels The Jungle, Maggie and American Tragedy all follow this structure.
A narrative that moves from place to place, though it might be chronological, may follow a spatial or descriptive structure.
Girl by Jamacia Kincaid follows a classification sturcture - the piece is a list of all the things a girl from the islands will learn from her mother. It is not chronological. Her piece, though, is interspesed with commentary of her mother who at several points in the first pages warns her daughter about sexual promiscuity - charging she wants to become a slut. So, this interspesal also forms a structure of sorts. It is important to understand the overall structure of the piece, but it is even more important to see the variations that the author uses within a general, say clasificatory, structure because those variation will indicate and support the purpose. A statement of structure and purpose for Girl might be "Kincaid weaves moral lessons and practical techniquesher mother taught her as the woof and warp of her upbringing, the fabric with which she as a writer was clothed."
Kozol's structure in Still Separate, Still Unequal follows the assertion/justification structure. He makes a claim then justifies it with his research and annecdotes. But he also peppers the reader with statistics. When he claims in paragraph two that schools are resegregating he cits Chicago, then Washington D.C., then St. Louis, the Philadelphia, then Cleveland, the Los Angeles etc. This rapid fire, statistics laden sturcture underscores his purpose: to bring intensity and urgency about the problem to the minds of American readers. He is at it again, see page 42, heading his paragraphs with "In a Seattle neighborhood," "'At Thurgood Marshall,'" "In New York City. . ." His style is hard hitting; his structure supports his style and purpose.
