In Frank J. D’Angelo’s 1974 College Composition and Communication article, “A Generative Rhetoric of the Essay,” he writes “despite the countless number of composition and rhetoric texts dealing with arrangement, we know very little about order in composition. In many texts, arrangement is either neglected, or its treatment is woefully inadequate” (p. 388). In fact, continues D’Angelo, “[a]lthough we have a number of useful studies describing patterns of arrangement beyond the sentence, very little has been done in describing units of discourse beyond the paragraph” (p. 388). Speaking of pattern, Brooke, in his chapter on arrangement, reframes this canon as “pattern.” As Stephen Keoni Holmes writes in his 2010 Enculturation review of Lingua Fracta, “[t] mistake scholars of new media make is the binary assumption that arrangement is either entirely the author’s control or not at all. If static media theorists looked at arrangement as linear “sequence,” Brooke urges us to look at hypertext arrangement as “pattern” (Holmes, 2010, n.p.).

In his entry on arrangement for his Sourcebook (2001), James Jasinski writes that arrangement, in the classical sense, had to do with naming and understanding the different parts of an oration. Cicero, for example, identified six of these parts as (1) the introduction, (2) the narrative or exposition, (3) the partition (identifying what matters will be discussed in a particular case), (4) confirmation (essentially the “pro” side), (5) confutation (essentially the “con” side), and (6) the conclusion (Jasinski, 2001, p. 60). Jasinski states that Cicero’s six parts shows up in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium and in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (p. 60).

For Eyman (2015), although arrangement traditionally referred to the formal organization of a text, in the digital age it means “manipulating digital media as well as selecting ready-made works and reconstituting them into new works; remixing” (Eyman, 2015, p. 65). Here I am reminded of Adam J. Banks on remixing in his book, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (2011). He writes that “DJs are not mere ventriloquists, playing or telling other people’s stories for us; rather, their arranging, layering, sampling, and remixing are inventions too, keeping the culture, telling their stories and ours, binding time as they move the crowd and create and maintain community” (Banks, 2011, p. 24). Doug Brent, in his 1997 Kairos piece, “Rhetorics of the Web: Implications for Teachers of Literacy,” writes the following about the canon of arrangement: “In rhetoric, arrangement is determined more by the context, the audience, the rhetorical purpose–the cluster of exigencies that rhetoricians refer to as kairos–than by a “logical” progression of propositions” (Brent, 1997, n.p.). According to Eyman, in the space of digital rhetoric, “arrangement may be a conscious decision of the writer of the digital text, but it may also be left up to the user, as in the case of hypertext, where the reader creates a new arrangement with each reading. In this case, arrangement is more of a boundary condition, as the possible arrangements are limited by the number of nodes and the links between them that have been established by the author” (pp. 68-69).

For Brooke, “[o]ne of the assumptions underlying” his conception of arrangement as pattern, “is that arrangement, which for a long time has been one of the most visible of canons, must be thought of in terms of practice if it is to thrive in the interfaces of new media” (p. 92). He makes the point that an isolated textual object’s exhibiting of any kind of analyzable ordering is chiefly the concern of those who work with print. In our new digital age, however, arrangement has/will have more to do with the practices we cultivate with new media (p. 92). Again, this sounds a lot like Banks on the phenomenon of remixing. Arrangement becomes a question of where we fit in as interface communicators and users in a technological age which allows us to take advantage of opportunities we wouldn’t have had in the past. An social media influencer, for example, who defeats a much older boxing champion in the ring, is not remixing anything that moves us forward together.