80 Choosing an Organizational Pattern (7.1.1)

Organizing Your Presentation

Once you’ve completed your research and prepared your proposal or report, your next step is to share that information in a presentation. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting your findings, or recommending a solution, organizing your content logically and clearly is essential.

To begin, revisit your audience, context, and purpose. These will guide the structure and tone of your presentation. You’ll also need to refer to your purpose statement, which should help you determine what kind of structure will work best.

The following are common organizational patterns used in presentations. Each serves a different purpose depending on the type of content you’re presenting.

Chronological Pattern

Purpose: To explain a process, give instructions, or promote understanding.

Use this pattern when explaining something that happens over time. Chronological means time order. This structure works well for topics such as the following:

• Company history (e.g., growth over the past 10 years)

• A step-by-step process (e.g., product development stages)

• Events or milestones (e.g., timeline of a marketing campaign)

Whether you cover decades or days, the key is that events are presented in the order they occurred.

Spatial Pattern

Purpose: To explain how parts of a space or system relate to each other physically.

A spatial pattern organizes ideas by physical space or direction. This pattern helps your audience visualize a layout or location.

Examples:

• Comparing regional sales across Canada (east to west)

• Describing the layout of a new facility (front to back, top to bottom)

Topical Pattern (or Parts-of-the-Whole Pattern)

Purpose: To inform or persuade by breaking a topic into logical parts.

This is the most flexible pattern. Use it when your topic naturally breaks into categories, types, or parts.

Examples:

• Types of leadership styles

• Parts of a new software platform

• Categories of risk in a construction project

If you’re trying to persuade, consider ending with your strongest point. This is called the climax order and is especially useful in sales pitches or proposal presentations.

Cause–and–Effect Pattern

Purpose: To explain how one thing leads to another or to analyze problems and consequences.

Use this pattern when your goal is to show why something happened or what resulted from it. You might focus on causes, effects, or both.

Examples:

• The causes of a supply chain delay

• The effects of remote work on productivity

• How a change in regulations affected project timelines

Problem–Solution Pattern

Purpose: To motivate action or suggest a specific change or solution.

This pattern is common in persuasive presentations. First, you describe the problem clearly. Then, you propose one or more solutions.

Examples:

• A safety issue and how to address it

• A staffing shortage and proposed recruitment strategies

In some cases, it’s helpful to include the cause of the problem before the solution. This variation—problem-cause-solution—adds depth to your analysis.

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is a more structured version of this approach, a persuasive model that walks the audience through five steps: attention, need, satisfaction, visualization, and action (German, Gronbeck, Ehninger & Monroe, 2012).

Choosing the Right Pattern

There’s no single “best” pattern—choose the one that best supports your purpose and makes your ideas clear to the audience. A well-organized presentation builds credibility, maintains interest, and helps listeners follow your ideas. See Table 11.2 below for a quick reference of presentation organization patterns.

Table 11.2: Presentation Organization Patterns 

Attribution

This section contains material from Chapter 10.7 “Organizational Models for Presentations” in Introduction to Professional Communication and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

References

References are at the end of this chapter.