Reading & Writing in Chronological Order

Much of the reading 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 woman in a story wants to prepare for an exam, she will first go to
class, then study, then 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 our prior knowledge to help figure out the chronological order of a reading.

 Context Clues: Look at a reading and see what words are used. Nouns
and pronouns can be context clues 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 reading, 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 reading
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.
 Prior Knowledge: 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
reading.

Sometimes a reading 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 reading jumps around, or moves out of order. When we
understand the order things usually occur we can better comprehend, or
understand, a reading.

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 reader follow our writing easily.