Identify common nonfiction text structures, cause and effect, compare and contrast, problem and solution, and chronological sequence, and explain how recognizing structure helps you follow an informational text.
Nonfiction writers organize information using recognizable structures, and naming the structure a text is using helps a reader predict what kind of information is coming next and how the ideas connect to one another, rather than experiencing facts as an unconnected list.
Four structures come up constantly, each with its own typical cue words. Cause and effect uses words like because, as a result, and therefore. Compare and contrast uses however, similarly, and on the other hand. Problem and solution uses issue, challenge, and one approach is. Chronological or sequence structure uses first, next, and by the following year. Here is a short sample passage: "Because autumn temperatures drop sharply across their northern range, monarch butterflies migrate as far as Mexico each year. As a result, a single monarch may travel over two thousand miles, even though no individual butterfly completes the full round trip in its own lifetime." The repeated because and as a result mark this passage clearly as cause and effect.
Mastery looks like: They can identify a nonfiction passage's dominant structure using specific cue words as evidence, and can find and label the structure of a real, independently chosen nonfiction text.
Common stumbles: Guessing a structure without pointing to specific cue words as evidence; assuming an entire text must use only one structure throughout rather than checking section by section.
See it visually
Interactive, spoken-aloud tools that show this idea in motion.