The writing convention in which the events in a narrative are scrambled as they come to the writer's mind…

Step 1: Analyze the question The question asks for the name of a writing technique in which events and thoughts are presented as they occur in a character's or narrator's mind, jumbled and unordered, with no effort to arrange them chronologically or logically.

Step 2: Explain the concept Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique that records the continuous, flowing, and often disorderly thoughts, memories, feelings, and sensations of a character. Its main features are:

• Thoughts follow free association rather than logical order.
• Time sequence is often broken, with past and present mixed together.
• Sentences may be fragmented, with little punctuation.
• It tries to imitate the way the human mind actually works.

Famous examples are James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In African literature, some passages in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born use a similar approach.

Step 3: Evaluate the options

• A. Psycho-consciousness styles: This is not a recognised literary term.
• B. Narrator's mind style: This is also not a standard literary convention.
• C. Shifting style: This is not an established term for this technique. It may sound like a change in style or viewpoint, but it does not describe scrambled thoughts.
• D. Stream of consciousness: This matches the description exactly. Thoughts and events appear as they come to mind, with no orderly sequence.

Step 4: Answer The correct option is D. stream of consciousness.

Exam tip: When you see "thoughts flowing as they occur in the mind, unordered, without structure," think stream of consciousness. Remember it this way: the mind is like a river, and the thoughts flow freely without stopping to be arranged. Also contrast it with flashback, where past events are deliberately inserted into the story in an organised way.