Many of the devices that bind sentences within a paragraph—repeating a key term, counting the elements, signaling what’s to come, asking and answering questions—can do the same work across paragraphs, creating smooth transitions from one to the next.
REPEAT A WORD OR PHRASE FROM THE END OF THE PRECEDING PARAGRAPH
Words or phrases from one paragraph repeated at the start of the next explicitly tie the two together.
Only 3,100 surnames are now in use in China, say researchers, compared with nearly 12,000 in the past. An “evolutionary dwindling” of surnames is common to all societies, according to Du Ruofu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; but in China, he says, where surnames have been in use far longer than in most other places, the paucity has become acute.
To get an idea of just how acute, imagine that the combined populations of the United States and Japan had to make do with but five surnames. That, essentially, is how things are in China, where the five most common surnames—Li, Wang, Zhang, Liu, and Chen—are shared by no fewer than 350 million people. Those named Li alone number 87 million, nearly 8% of the country’s Han people, the ethnic Chinese. Another 19 surnames each cover 1% or more of the population.
So far, RNA editing has been seen in marsupials, protozoa, slime moulds, ferns, and flowering plants. Flies do it. Mice do it. And, it now appears, people do it.
Or rather, in most cases, their mitochondria do it. Mitochondria—the cellular machines where glucose is burned for energy—are found in all cells more sophisticated than bacteria. Indeed, many biologists suspect that the ancestors of mitochondria actually were bacteria which gave up an independent life to live symbiotically in early complex cells. They have their own genes, in any case. And these genes are turning out be heavily edited.
TURN THE REPEATED WORD INTO A QUESTION
Turning the repeated word or phrase at the start of the second paragraph into a question raises an eyebrow of doubt or irony.
Many of the EFF’s critics predicted this from the start. The move to Washington in the first place was fiercely controversial among its on-line constituency, whose members worried that the organization would lose touch with its cultural roots.
Cultural roots? It may be hard to imagine something as amorphous and all-included as cyberspace having either roots or a culture. But it does. The chief principle of this culture—decentralization—comes from the structure of the Internet, at present cyberspace’s main incarnation. The Internet has no real governing body, no real shape, and almost no rules. It is nothing more than a common language by which computers can talk to each other.
In a country with no more arable land than Holland, Egypt has close on 60m people, half of them under 21. True, Egypt’s economic indicators are bright—“a vibrant economy” is the current official phrase—but economists reckon that it would take a sustained growth rate of 7% or more to soak up the new job-seekers.
Vibrant? With the help of American development aid, parts of the country’s infrastructure have been transformed: the telephones miraculously work, there is an electricity surplus, and a new metro system may, eventually, ease serious permanent traffic jams. But investors in Egypt have still to plough through a hideous quagmire of laws, regulations and bureaucracy.
Note how the second paragraphs, without the questions, would have a flat start. The questions thus link the paragraphs and enliven the prose.
REPEAT AN OPENING WORD OR PHRASE
Repeating an opening word or phrase at the beginning of paragraphs propels your argument across two or more of them.
Banks’ credit-risk models are mind-bogglingly complex. But the question they try to answer is actually quite simple: how much of a bank’s lending might plausibly turn bad? Armed with the answer, banks can set aside enough capital to make sure they stay solvent should the worst happen.
No model, of course can take account of every possibility. Credit-risk models try to put a value on how much a bank should realistically expect to lose in the 99.9% or so of the time that passes for normality. This requires estimating three different things: the likelihood that any given borrower will default; the amount that might be recoverable if that happened; and the likelihood that the borrower will default at the same time others are doing so.
The repeated opening also tells readers that the paragraphs are doing similar work—that the second paragraph adds to or elaborates on the point of the first.
Small wonder, then, that such a variety of insects and plants were unwittingly trapped in the stickiness and thereby preserved, fragmentary DNA and all. The exhibition’s 200-odd fossil marvels include entombed ants, a frog, a scorpion, a perfect flower and a yet-to-be-revealed mystery item that Dr Grimaldi discovered recently in New Jersey.
Small wonder, too, that amber has long had cultural significance. Though not especially rare (many trees exuded great gouts of the stuff) it is both attractive and easy to work. Amber has been carved since the Stone Age into symbolic figures and used as currency. The Greeks and Romans alike were fascinated by its weightless luminosity. In recent years the Baltic amber that was expensively transported across Europe to the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago has become ubiquitous as a cheap jewel, exported now as earrings and brooches by modern Balts as desperate as their forebears for trade.
SIGNAL WHAT’S TO COME
Conjunctions and transitional phrases join paragraphs by signaling reversals, continuations, and restatements.
Some of this hand-wringing is disingenuous. Many trade group lobbyists are privately crowing over having outflanked the Administration and the Democratic leadership; the National Federation of Independent Business Inc. (NFIB) send journalists reprints of a U.S. News & World Report article touting the small-business lobby’s routing of reform legislation.
Nor should the lobbyist’s somber demeanor be confused with regret. Most health care industry groups supported only narrow reform proposals of their own design and they clearly preferred inaction to any plan that threatened their members’ livelihoods.
But the aftermath of the health care reform battle is unfolding like a bad mystery novel. The victim had dozens of enemies, but now that he’s dead, all of them are finding something nice to say about him—and working hard on their alibis. Opinion polls show the public still clamoring for some type of reform, and no group wants to be the target of wrath for this year’s inaction.
And gloating isn’t a good way to win friends and influence people on Capitol Hill. House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman John D. Dinglee, D-Mich., has promised to hold extensive hearings into the operations of the insurance industry next year—giving a hint of the strained relationships left in the wake of this year’s battle.
The best laid plans for the European Union’s single currency may yet go astray, but at least the blueprint is on the table. On May 31 the European Commission released its ideas for economic and monetary union (EMU), and proposed a publicity blitz to gain popular support for a three-phase program: the decision to launch the single currency and identify the countries qualified to use it; the “irrevocable” fixing, within a deadline of the following 12 months, of the parities of those countries’ currencies; and, within a deadline of three years after that, the transition to the single currency, with its coins and notes introduced “over a few weeks at the most”.
In other words, read the Maastricht treaty, which gives starting dates for EMU of 1997 at the earliest and January 1st 1999 at the latest, add a year and then another three, and by 2003 Europeans will be emptying their pockets of marks and francs and filling them with a new Euro-currency.
Though many writers avoid opening a paragraph with a conjunction, as the writer of the second example does, these words are ideal transitional words—they are clear and direct, and tell readers what to expect next.
ESTABLISH PAIRS ACROSS PARAGRAPHS
Similar to repeating a word or phrase, mirroring elements from one paragraph to the next not only aids transition, but links the point of one paragraph to the next.
CIA officials used to have all sorts of irritating habits. If offered a perfectly good Chateauneuf-du-Pape at a Georgetown dinner party, they would praise it—by stressing their dissent from the “universal opinion” that unblended reds are better. If told of an especially good trattoria in Rome, they might express much gratitude for the information—and deplore their own laziness in always going to the same old Sabatini they had first encountered while vacationing in Italy with their parents. Even more irritating was the propensity of first-generation CIA officials for interjecting into any remotely relevant conversation memories of Groton, Yale, or skiing holidays in St. Moritz.
There is none of that sort of thing anymore. Today’s CIA people are not wine snobs—in fact, many of them prefer beer, while others refrain from even coffee, as befits good Mormons. Nor are they partial to foreign foods in funky trattorias—cheeseburgers are more their style. Instead of being Ivy League showoffs, they are quietly proud of their state colleges, however obscure these might be.
What people drink, where they eat, and where they went to school make the point about how CIA officials have changed.
ASK A QUESTION AT THE END OF ONE PARAGRAPH AND ANSWER IT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NEXT
Questions suggest answers. Posing a question at the end of a paragraph signals the reader to look for your answer in the next.
Having to announce a big drop in profits is not the way any chairman would choose to mark his second week on the job. That was the unenviable task of the new chief of J.P. Morgan, one of America’s oldest and mightiest banks, on January 12. Douglas Warner disclosed that the bank’s net profit in 1994 was $1.2 billion, 29% less than in 1993. So why does he look so cheerful?
Perhaps because he thinks the bank’s hardest work has been done. Morgan is at the tail end of a metamorphosis that started in the late 1970s, when this starched commercial bank saw big corporate borrowers turning in their masses from bank loans toward cheaper sources of capital, such as bonds. Under the chairmanship of Sir Dennis Weatherstone, Morgan changed further, concentrating resources on the fee-earning businesses, such as advising clients, and on trading securities. By the end of 1993, noninterest income accounted for 72% of Morgan’s earnings, compared with 39% a decade earlier.
A bare two years before the ceremonial opening of St Peter’s Holy Door hails the new millennium, Romans are scratching their heads. How can the eternal city cope with an expected influx of millions? Will the traffic flow? Can Rome, even with help from central coffers, afford the sort of projects that the jubilee’s organizers deem essential? Will they, budgets willing, be ready on time?
Do not bet on it. The space problem is the oldest and worst. For hundreds of years, fragile old Rome has been hard put to embrace a few hundred thousand pilgrims—let alone the 20m-40m expected in the millennial year. Rome lacks vast open spaces. The Piazza San Giovanni, the city’s biggest, is chock-full with about 170,000 people; Piazza del Popolo can hold a mere 62,000.
In the second example, a flood of questions gets a simple answer at the start of the second paragraph, quickly dismissing any possibility that Rome might cope.
ASK A QUESTION AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND PARAGRAPH
Opening with a question about the previous paragraph announces that an explanation will follow.
Platinum may be more expensive, troy ounce for troy ounce, but gold remains the noblest metal in the eyes of chemists. Other so-called noble metals react fairly easily with their environment—a copper roof turns green and silver tarnishes—but gold’s ability to resist all but the strongest acids is part of the reason it has fascinated kings and commoners for centuries. Even platinum helps other chemicals to react, which is why it is used as a catalyst for car exhausts. Gold, however, remains haughtily above such common tasks, refusing to react with the molecular masses.
But why? It is not as though gold were chemically inert. After all, anything less than 24-carat gold is an example of gold’s ability to bond strongly with other noble metals. The unresolved puzzle has been why oxygen, hydrogen, and other reactive constituents of the atmosphere—and the constituents of many acids—are hard put to bond with gold. Theorists in Denmark now believe that they have the answer. And their calculations do not only provide an explanation for gold’s unique pedigree. They also point the way to designing better catalysts.
In other cases, families can afford to send their children to school only if they also work at the same time. It is this family dilemma that makes laws against child labor so difficult to enforce. Thus in Mexico children obtain forged birth certificates in order to secure jobs in the maquiladora factories operated by U.S. firms along the northern border. And it is this that makes worthy corporate codes of conduct liable to backfire: the danger is that, far from contributing to the end of child labor, they merely shift it to shadier areas of the economy that are far harder to police.
So what should companies do? Some initiatives appear more promising than others. One such is the effort that Levi Strauss, a maker of jeans, has made to provide schooling for child workers in its suppliers’ plants in Bangladesh. The provision of other benefits, such as medical care and meals, may also be appropriate.
The Börsen-Zeitung is among the most expensive daily papers in the world. For the hefty DM 7.20 ($3.80) cover price, readers get the best and most detailed reporting of German companies. The editor, Hans Konradin Herdt, has the sharpest pen of any financial journalist in the country: bound copies of his leading articles are sent to all subscribers as a Christmas present. His satirical talents reduce sober-sided German financiers to stitches. “A silver bullet into the boardroom,” is one advertiser’s assessment of the paper’s reach.
Just who reads it? That, it turns out, is a closely guarded secret. Usually for a newspaper supported by advertising, the Börsen-Zeitung refuses to disclose figures, lest they be “misunderstood,” Mr. Herdt says. It also declines to commission standard research about its jobs and spending power. Insiders suspect that circulation is small, between 6,000 and 10,000. Simon McPhillips of DMB&B, an advertising agency, says the “ludicrous” lack of information certainly deters advertisers, especially foreign ones.
MAKE A COMMENT
Opening comments—like opening questions—strengthen the link with the preceding paragraph.
Austria, Finland, and Sweden have joined the club. The new members will do no more than tilt the map of Europe a bit to the north and east, but that is proving enough to make those on the southern fringes feel uneasy. They are worried that their concerns will seem relatively unimportant to the northern majority. In particular they fret about North Africa.
With good reason. The Christmas hijacking of an Air France jet by Islamic extremists served as a grim reminder to the French that their former colony, Algeria, is fighting a civil war that may well spill over into France and prompt an exodus of refugees across the Mediterranean. Like France, Spain and Italy already receive a steady flow of illegal immigrants from North Africa, where poverty and fecundity combine to make the adventurous seek a better life in Europe.
Sanctions have recently come to seem the tool of choice in foreign policy. During the cold war, the big task of containing communism was done mainly with tanks and nukes: from 1945 until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, America imposed sanctions less than once a year on average. Now, deprived of a single overarching threat, Americans worry about a range of lesser ones. Few warrant the use of force; all exercise some Washington constituency enough to generate pressure for action. And so, on Mr. Eizenstat’s count, America resorted to sanctions 61 times between 1993 and 1996—a frequency 15 times greater than during the cold war.
Up to a point, this is fine. In the past, western sanctions risked driving private countries into the arms of the Soviet Bloc; these days, Russia can be persuaded to go along with sanctions on pariahs like Iraq, so they are more effective. But the rise of sanctions also reflects troubling trends.
The comments—With good reason and Up to a point, this is fine—could have been made at the end of the first paragraph, but that would have broken the link with the second.
COUNT
Counting is a simple but effective transitional device to link several paragraphs.
However, there are several reasons why the government should be cautious before dipping its hands into taxpayers’ pockets. First, although charities seem to add significant value at current levels of funding, there is no guarantee that any extra money will produce similar amounts of added value. It may be that charities’ income and outputs are around their optimal level, and that the value added would fall as their income, and therefore their costs, rose.
Second, the study does not look at whether the government agencies or private firms could perform good works more efficiently than charities do. In research comparing care homes for the elderly, Laing & Buisson, a health-care consultancy, has found that charity-run homes are less cost-effective than ones run by for-profit firms. Were this true of good deeds in general, it might be better for the government to hire private contractors to care for vulnerable people, instead of subsiding charities to do so.
First and above all, the “Decline and Fall” is a good history. In its massive erudition, its phenomenal accuracy and its sober judgment it still stands as the indispensable starting point of any study of the Roman empire. Second, the work should be read for the majesty of Gibbon’s prose. This is eloquence in the grandest manners, cunningly matched to its twin functions of narration and explanation. It is not to be imitated, but to be studied and enjoyed.
PLACE PARAGRAPHS IN TIME
When your paragraphs show a progression in time, use that natural chronology to link them.
In 1969, when relations between China and the Soviet Union were at their worst, China provoked a series of skirmishes, mostly along the Heilongjiang border. Harbin’s government, believing a Soviet invasion to be imminent, set about building underground corridors, about three kilometres long, that were meant to house the whole of the city’s population in the event of an attack. These were kept meticulously ready until 1985, when peace broke out.
Now they have a new use. The corridors have been turned into a thriving temple of free enterprise selling the latest fashions from Hong Kong. With the shelter the corridors offer from Harbin’s—25°C cold, and with the hundreds of jobs this subterranean market has created, they must surely be Russia’s greatest gift to the chilly city.
The old model was simple. Information was stored in the DNA of genes. When needed, it was transcribed into template molecules known as messenger RNAs. Then a piece of machinery called a ribosome translated the template, constructing a protein as it went.
Later the model got a bit more complicated. Genes, it was discovered, consist of lengths of informative DNA interspersed with apparently meaningless stretches known as introns. Before a messenger RNA template can be copied into proteins the introns must be removed from it—a process known as splicing.
Now things are getting more complicated still. In the past few years a new phenomenon has been discovered. Sometimes, after the template has been made and the introns removed, the RNA is edited. Sometimes, indeed, it is edited heavily. In the most extreme examples known so far, more than half of the information needed to make a protein has not come from the original gene. Instead, it has been edited into the messenger RNA template.
ANNOUNCE AN EXAMPLE
Some paragraphs illustrate a previous point, opening with Take or Consider or having a for example near the front.
Attacking corporate fat cats has plenty of voter appeal, particularly when few people have yet to feel much benefit from Britain’s economic recovery. But there is no reason to suppose that the bulk of Labour politicians are only pretending to hold these views. And, on their merits, none of these attacks on profitable firms is sustainable.
The IPPR study, for instance, criticises the external costs and regional concentrations of supermarket chains using criteria so unreasonable that they would condemn most large industries. The Office of Fair Trading and the Monopolies and Mergers Commission studied supermarkets several times but found no proof of serious market failure or lack of competition.
Once upon a time New York’s bankers drank lunch-time martinis; blue-collar Texans drank beer as they cruised the highway; and sophisticates everywhere could tell the difference between bourbon and rye. So much for lost hedonism. Alcohol consumption in America has been declining for the past 17 years, and today no figure with a claim to respectability—politician, businessman or banker—can risk even a single drink at lunch-time. Alcohol is a poison or a distraction; and its use is to be shunned, or indeed restricted.
Last week, for example, President Clinton stood beside Brenda Frazier, whose daughter Ashley had been killed by a drunk driver, and announced plans, to apply first on federal property and then across the whole country, to lower the alcohol level at which a driver can still legally drive. “There is hardly a family or community in America”, said the president, “that hasn’t been touched by drunk driving.”
STRING EXAMPLES TOGETHER
You can also string examples together across paragraphs—either to extend them or to contrast them.
Sometimes it irks allies such as the French to see America grab so much of the credit for its mediating efforts. But as even the French admit, America is in a league of its own in this business. No other country can match its clout and its credibility with parties on all sides of an argument. Bosnia is the most striking example: a catastrophe so long as America kept its distance, on the mend once America started to lead.
There are other, less conspicuous examples. Last January an almost comic fracas over a tiny rock in the Aegean briefly threatened to escalate into an alarming conflict between two NATO members, Greece and Turkey. While the European powers looked the other way, and the United Nations called for restraint, the Greeks and the Turks turned to America to help sort the matter out—which, after multiple telephone calls to agitated leaders in Athens and Ankara, it duly did. The next day one of the America diplomats involved, Richard Holbrooke, the star of the Dayton peace talks on Bosnia, described the incident as a microcosm of modern American foreign policy.
But cuts here are political dynamite. Take the government’s planned cuts in state help to unemployed and poor people with mortgages, on which spending has grown from £31 in 1979 to £1.1 billion today. Tony Blair, Labour’s leader, is determined to stop the cuts. So is Nicholas Winterton, a Tory right-winger keen on cuts in general, who threatens to lead a rebellion against Mr Lilley’s plans.
Or take the recent cuts in non-means-tested invalidity benefits. Many of those claiming the benefits are middle-income people who had to retire early and were advised by their employers to top up their pensions with the benefit. And what are many doing with their new-found leisure? Spending it at Tory coffee mornings, that’s what. Mr Lilley has warned colleagues that opposition to cuts in invalidity payments has yet to peak.
UNDERMINE
By undermining the point of the first paragraph, you can propel your argument in the next. You can either be subtle:
For the first time since 1985, the Geneva-based World Economic Forum has rated the U.S. economy the most competitive in the world. The U.S. Council on Competitiveness, a private coalition of leaders from industry, labor and education, recently concluded that “the United States has significantly strengthened its competitive position in critical technologies during the past five years.”
But just like word of Mark Twain’s death, reports of America’s industrial revival are exaggerated. The Sonys, Respironics, and Medrads are isolated islands of success in a sea of economic stagnation. They are what Richard Florida, director of the Center for Economic Development at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, calls deceptive examples of “reindustrialization amidst deindustrialization, pockets of growth that co-exist with the continued decline of some sectors and firms.”
or blatant:
Nippon Steel’s Yawata works on the island of Kyushu might stand as a symbol of post-war Japan. In its heyday in the early 1970s, when the economy was still booming and costs were low, the Yawata works employed 46,000. Just 6,400 people work there today. The country’s big blast-furnace steel makers have been elbowed aside by minimills, which are technologically more advanced, and by rivals from countries where costs are lower.
There is one catch with this tale: it is not true. Although employment has indeed fallen in Japan’s five integrated steel makers, they are thriving. Against all expectations, Nippon Steel, Kawasaki Steel, Sumitomo Metal Industries, Kobe Steel and Nippon Kashuha have brought production costs to within a whisker of the world’s most efficient producer, South Korea’s Pohang Iron & Steel Company (POSCO). The five can now churn out hot-rolled coil at about $300 a tonne compared with POSCO’s $270 a tonne.
In the example below, a question does the undermining:
The results are visible on the streets of Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest. Shops are full of western goods. Where grim-faced policemen once stared down pedestrians, street vendors now hawk their wares. The Communist Party’s former headquarters in Warsaw houses Poland’s infant stock exchange. Prague’s Wenceslas Square is festooned with colourful advertisements. Hundreds of thousands of local entrepreneurs have started small businesses. Scores of western law firms, consultants and accountants are setting up offices. From all appearances, business is booming.
Or is it? By most measures, Eastern Europe is in the grip of a prolonged and savage recession. After declining by 8% or so last year, the five countries’ GDPs are expected to drop another 8% this year. Industrial output has declined even faster, by 17% last year and probably 11% this year. Like all statistics about Eastern Europe, these figures are endlessly disputed and have to be taken with a large pinch of salt. They may paint too grim a picture because they underestimate the growth of private businesses. Yet these countries are clearly in economic trauma.