An Advance Organizer in technical communication is a structure that forecasts the organization of the following section of the text. Markel & Selber explain in their textbook Technical Communication (2021) that “Advance organizers give readers an overview of the discussion’s key points before they encounter the details in the discussion itself” (p. 201).
Writers use advance organizers to provide a “summary . . . for readers in a hurry, reading the summary substitutes for reading the whole [document]” (Markel & Selber p.388).
If you wrote a five-paragraph theme, your thesis sentence probably worked as an advance organizer by telling the reader what the three paragraphs following the introduction were about. Here are some examples from technical documents:
The following text in the document includes a subheading and section on Site Visits and another on Interviews with Faculty and Students.
The rest of the section includes subheadings and sections on three areas: Readability, Accessibility, and Document Design.
Following this advance organizer, the text includes a subheading and section on Creating Food Pantries and another on Teaching Students about Local Resources.
You can read a lot more about advance organizers in the article “When It’s Best to Be Explicit: Using Advance Organizers to Structure Your Argument.”
Markel, Michael H., & Selber, Stuart A. (2021). Technical communication (Thirteenth edition). Bedford/St. Martin’s.