GENRE

Arrangement, in its most narrow sense, is concerned with identifying the parts of a text and organizing those parts into a whole. Classical rhetoric focused on oral speeches, but arrangement has evolved to deal with written texts and, more recently, the visual design of texts, as well as the interplay of visual and aural design in electronic media. Although “arrangement” as a term is currently out of fashion, and the Greek and Latin terms, taxis and dispositio, are not familiar except to specialists, a cluster of overlapping terms cover essentially the same subject in a wide variety of disciplines: “form,” “organization,” “design,” “shape,” and “structure.”

This subject comes second in classical rhetoric's canon, but does the form, as Louis Sullivan says in the epigraph above, really follow the function? Does the invention of ideas determine how the ideas will be arranged? Do you see what materials are available and then decide what you can build?