MANY writers think of paragraphs as a collection of sentences framed by an indent and a carriage return, running perhaps ten or twelve lines. Few have the language to describe what’s good—or bad—about a paragraph. This book shows you what it means for a paragraph to be unified, coherent, and well developed. The idea here is to give you a way of looking at paragraphs that will change the way you write.
A paragraph is unified if each sentence is clearly related to the point, coherent if you make it obvious to your reader how each sentence is linked to the point. You can make the link more obvious by repeating key words and phrases. You can also use transitional words and phrases to enumerate and coordinate a paragraph’s sentences. And you can change the structure of your sentences to reveal parallel or subordinate ideas. These techniques do more than make your paragraphs coherent—they also give them pace.
A paragraph is well developed if its sentences unfold in a way that makes your argument perfectly clear to the reader. One of the best ways to do this is to express the point of the paragraph as a general statement in the first sentence and then to support it with details and examples in subsequent sentences. Used for perhaps half to two-thirds of all paragraphs in expository writing, this model is among the most common. Some of the other ways are to conclude with the point, to phrase the point as a question and answer, and to undermine an argument to make the opposite point. Still other ways include making a subtle (or not so subtle) comment at the end of a straightforward series of details. Deciding how you develop a paragraph generally depends on the details, examples, and comments you have to support your point.
BUILDING PARAGRAPHS FROM A PLAN
Strong paragraphs will emerge more easily if you have done some planning. (Riveting Reports, also in this series, is a good place to start.) A paragraph-by-paragraph plan helps you organize your material by going beyond an outline to identify the topic of each paragraph in an entire piece. You then write the topic of each paragraph at the top of a sheet of paper (or page screen, if you’re online) and try to make a strong point about each topic. Finally you assemble your raw material—details, comments, examples—under those points. With your material thus organized, and your head significantly clearer, you’re ready to write unified, coherent, well-developed paragraphs.
GETTING OFF TO A GOOD START
Opening paragraphs have tremendous effect on how—and whether—your piece will be read. The most common opening is the throat-clearing paragraph that blandly announces how the piece will unfold. What you want instead is to grab your readers’ attention, rivet them to your message, and propel them through your argument. Here are a few ways to do just that.
Put your main message up front. Tell your readers exactly what you intend to get across to them by setting out your main and any supporting messages up front, where they can’t be missed.
In no society today do women enjoy the same opportunities as men. This unequal status leaves considerable disparities between how much women contribute to human development and how little they share in its benefits.
Start with a gripping fact. Present a compelling (or even shocking) fact or statistic that you suspect your readers will find interesting.
Every twenty minutes or so, someone somewhere is killed or injured by a landmine. According to the United Nations more than 110m buried mines are left over from the 20th century’s numerous wars—most of them in poor countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia which can ill afford the cost of removing them.
Ask questions. Ask questions to draw your readers in as participants, enticing them to read on and find out the answers.
Swamped by voicemail and email? Prepare yourself for the next wave of digital communications deluge: instant messaging.
Set the scene. Descriptive details can pull readers in by helping them to visualize the scene you’re setting.
Out here in Big Sky Country, high on a ridge in the Absaroka Range, a golden eagle soars, pushed upward by a stream of warm air. From its perch in a golden-leafed aspen, a Steller’s jay the color of indigo shrieks at the interlopers 20 feet below. A Clark’s nutcracker drills into a pine cone, the only sound except the distant rumble from the Yellowstone River.
Surprise your readers. Humor can put your readers at ease, a tactic especially useful before launching into a controversial topic.
The bagpipe’s appeal is difficult to explain. Playing it can be a lonely calling. At a party, nobody asks you to sit down and bang out a song. You wear a skirt. There are the jokes.
Present a brief history. Starting with a historical anecdote adds the interest of analogy—and boosts your credibility.
Even the early stages of the Industrial Revolution quickly made England the wealthiest society that had ever existed, but it took a long time for the wealth to be reflected in the earnings of ordinary workers. Economic historians still argue about whether real wages rose or fell between 1790 and 1830, but the very fact that there is an argument shows that the laboring classes did not really share in the nation’s new prosperity.
It’s happening again. As with early 19th century England, late 20th century America is a society being transformed by radical new technologies that have failed to produce a dramatic improvement in the lives of ordinary working families—indeed, these are the technologies whose introductions have been associated with stagnant or declining wages for many. The Industrial Revolution was not based on silicon and information; but in a deep sense the story is probably much the same.
Address your readers. Use the imperative to involve your readers personally.
Imagine it is late 1986 and you are managing a consumer electronics factory in Japan. Your business is in trouble. The deal struck at the Plaza Hotel the year before has doubled the value of the yen—the currency your manufacturing costs are based in—against the dollar, the currency of your biggest export market. Your workers are expensive and it is hard to find anyone to do jobs that involve the three ks—kitamai, kiken, kitsui (dirty, dangerous, or tough). The currencies of your most aggressive competitors, the Taiwanese and Koreans, have risen only slightly against the dollar and they are snatching market share away from you. What do you do?
Open with a quotation. Using someone else’s well-put words can handily set the tone for what follows.
“Unsex me!” cried Lady Macbeth in a plea to the spirits that should probably be inscribed in the Pentagon somewhere.
“Character,” says Aristotle, “gives us qualities, but it is in actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.” We have already decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the consequences of disagreeing with him.
SUMMING UP
Powerful closing paragraphs convey the essence of an argument’s main points without restating all of its detail. The strongest closing paragraphs put the main points in a broader perspective and provoke further thought.
Restate the essence of your main message. The most common kind of closing paragraph restates the conclusions of a report. Try to restate only the essence of your main messages, using new language or a new image.
There is a curve of time that separates Heman Sweatt and Cheryl Hopwood. It has been a long while since that spring afternoon in 1950 when, as a first-year Yale law student, I heard the promise of freedom in the voice of Thurgood Marshall. Since then, I have observed commendable progress, lately some tragic retrogression, and now I see even more clearly that, in the long, bloody history of the race relations in America, there is no more time for foolishness.
This example also pulls in the title of the report (“Achieving Analytical Wisdom”), linking the last line of the closing paragraph to the very beginning of the report. Readers will feel as though they have come full circle and will have a sense of completion.
Use a closing quotation. Sometimes someone else has already summed up the message of your piece quite well. If so, use it.
In the meantime, expatriates like Bowles and McPhillips cling stubbornly to their adopted city. “It still has this attraction, this inexplicable ability to pull at your heart and soul,” McPhillips says. “There’s the light, the air, the wind blowing through the strait, the interplay between Europe and Morocco that will never change. Tangier is indestructible.”
This quotation offers proof of the writer’s concluding idea:
Will the wily Mr. Castro change with the times? He seems to be incapable of it—incapable of abandoning his ideology even for the sake of increasing his chances of maintaining power. Fidel himself puts it this way. “It is the world that is changing. Cuba will not change…even death will not defeat us.”
Pose a question. One question, or a series of questions, will suggest ways to branch from your argument or its possible trajectories. Or, as in this example, it can be used as a comment to linger in people’s minds.
The real differences between the mergers of the 1980s and previous waves do not lie either in the hostility of the bids or the nature of the financing. They lie in why the restructuring took place and in the forms of ownership and capital structure that were assumed to be superior to the old. As an Irish prime minister once said after listening to a long debate between his cabinet colleagues: “I understand how it works in practice. But how does it work in theory?”
Propose a challenge or future direction. Put your purpose into words by giving readers something concrete to do after reading your report.
But the aim should be for the UN, through the Security Council, to decide where a UN-sponsored force should be deployed and have the capacity to man it, not to subcontract the job and the decision-making to individual members. Turning the UN into cheerleader, or belated picker-up of superpowers’ problems, is not the way to improve peacekeeping. The UN’s authority needs to be strengthened, not sidestepped.
At the end of this book, you’ll find another sampling of paragraph models that can give your writing more variety and pace. Many of the techniques embodied in those models can bridge two paragraphs or develop an argument across a series of paragraphs. In between, you will learn how to identify the points of your paragraphs, how to present those points strongly, and how to support your points in clear, compelling ways to create powerful paragraphs.