Why do authors use chronological order

Even when we think we know what is going on in one scene, the scene that follows often tells us otherwise as it works backwards in time. In the fiction series Diary of a Wimpy Kid , everything the audience knows is from what they read in the diary of middle schooler Greg.

The diary starts at the beginning of the school year, and Greg makes an entry every day. Here are a few lines from a couple of different diary entries:. I guess Mom was pretty proud of herself for making me write in that journal last year, because now she went out and bought me another one.

Then I remembered: I still had the Cheese Touch from last year. It is a timeline of everything that happens to him day by day, and he tells us about past events, too. With each new book in the series you get to witness the details of his life as they happen, in chronological order, and learn more about his past through the memories he records.

Sometimes authors write things out in an actual timeline, similar to a diary. It looked thin to me. Do they KNOW how much work it took to lug that bag up the stairs? A flashback is when a story temporarily jumps backward to a previous moment in the past. A flash-forward is just like a flashback, but going forward—the story temporarily jumps to a specific moment in the future. In writing, establishing a chronology for your topic or story is a great starting point, and a crucial part of the big picture!

List of Terms Action. Ad Hominem. And if written in a linear narrative, novels such as The Time Traveler's Wife might not make much sense at all. Shifting back and forth in time creates suspense. Your readers can unravel the past and understand the ramifications in the present a little at a time.

It creates a tension that makes your books hard to put down. You also get a depth of character that withholding certain information brings to your narrative when writing non-chronologically. Showing past and present in alternate chapters, for example, would enable you to develop your characters more fully. Imagine a young boy protagonist who is fleeing the scene of an arson. There are dead bodies involved, and the boy has a gas can in his hand.

In the next scene, we see a snapshot of earlier that day when the boy argues with the parish priest. He pleads with the priest to release him from his altar boy responsibilities that day. Next, we come back to the present, and the boy is sitting in the back of a patrol car, throwing up and praying. You get depth of character by juxtaposing the image of the boy as an arsonist against his altar boy persona. And you want to know more about the fire and the dead bodies, right?

This is the easiest pattern to write and to follow. Some ways to organize descriptive writing include: chronological time , spatial location , and order of importance. When describing a person, you might begin with a physical description, followed by how that person thinks, feels and acts. Definition of Chronological. Examples of Chronological in a sentence. The easiest way to comprehend history is in chronological order, learning of events in the order that they happened in time.

Chronology is the arrangement of events by time. You can find chronologies of just about everything! In a chronological sequence the author uses the order of events, or chronology, to inform readers about events or content. The events may be organised by time or date, by arranging events as a series of steps or by following a list-like structure. Chronological sequencing is commonly used in nonfiction texts.

As adjectives the difference between sequential and chronological. There is a key difference between sequence and chronological: texts organized chronologically occur at a specific time and setting, whereas texts describing sequences do not occur at any specific time and place. Sequence Activities is the process of identifying and documenting relationships among the project activities.

The key benefit of this process is that it defines the logical sequence of work to obtain the greatest efficiency given all project constraints. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.

Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks.

Updated September 04,