IWriting Effective Paragraphs

WRITING EFFECTIVE PARAGRAPHS

A GENERATIVE RHETORIC OF THE PARAGRAPH

Adapted from Francis Christensen and Bonniejean Christensen, Notes Toward a New Rhetoric: Essays for Teachers (1978).

l. THE PARAGRAPH MAY BE DEFINED AS A SEQUENCE OF STRUCTURALLY RELATED SENTENCES.

By a sequence of structurally related sentences I mean a group of sentences related to one another by coordination and subordination. If the first sentence of a paragraph is the topic sentence, the second is quite likely to be a comment on it, a development of it, and therefore subordinate to it. The third sentence may be coordinate with the second sentence (as in this paragraph) or subordinate to it. The fourth sentence may be coordinate with either the second or third (or with both if they themselves are coordinate, as in this paragraph) or subordinate to the third. And so on. A sentence that is not coordinate with any sentence above it or subordinate to the next above it, breaks the sequence. The paragraph bas begun to drift from its moorings, or the writer has unwittingly begun a new paragraph.

2. THE TOP SENTENCE OF THE SEQUENCE IS THE TOPIC SENTENCE.

The topic sentence is comparable to the base clause of a cumulative sentence. It is the sentence on which the others depend. It is the sentence whose assertion is supported or whose meaning is explicated or whose parts are detailed by the sentences added to it. In the examples that follow, it will always be marked 1, for the top level.

3. THE TOPIC SENTENCE IS NEARLY ALWAYS THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE SEQUENCE.

The contrast between deductive [from general to specific] and inductive [from specific to general] ... seems to have led us to assume that the one kind of movement is as common as the other and that the topic sentence therefore is as likely to appear at the end as at the beginning. The many scores of paragraphs I have analyzed for this study do not bear out this assumption.... the topic sentence occurs almost invariably at the beginning.

In connected writing, the topic sentence varies greatly in how explicit it is in designating the thesis of the paragraph. Sometimes it is quite explicit; sometimes it is a mere sign pointing to the turn the new paragraph is going to take. Sometimes it is the shortest sentence of the paragraph; sometimes it is not even a grammatically complete sentence. Sometimes it is a question. It seems to me that these differences are irrelevant, provided only that the reader gets the signal and the writer remembers the signal he has called.

4. SIMPLE SEQUENCES ARE OF TWO SORTS, COORDINATE AND SUBORDINATE.

Here the parallel between sentence [structure] and paragraph [structure] becomes fully evident. [See WRITING EFFECTIVE SENTENCES]

A1. TWO-LEVEL (LEVEL 1 AND LEVEL 2) COORDINATE SENTENCE

1 [Lincoln's] words still linger on the lips

2 eloquent and cunning, yes,

2 vindictive and sarcastic in political debate,

2 rippling and ribald in jokes,

2 reverent in the half-formed utterance of prayer.

Alistair Cooke

A2. TWO-LEVEL (LEVEL 1 AND LEVEL 2) COORDINATE SEQUENCE PARAGRAPH

1 This is the essence of the religious spirit-the sense of power, beauty, greatness, truth infinitely beyond one's own reach, but infinitely to be aspired to.

2 It invests men with pride in a purpose and with humility in accomplishment.

2 It is the source of all true tolerance, for in its light all men see other men as they see themselves, as being capable of being more than they are, and yet falling short, inevitably, of what they can imagine human opportunities to be.

2 It is the supporter of human dignity and pride and the dissolver of vanity.

2 And it is the very creator of the scientific spirit; for without the aspiration to understand and control the miracle of life, no man would have sweated in a laboratory or tortured his brain in the exquisite search after truth.

Dorothy Thompson

B1. MULTILEVEL SUBORDINATE SENTENCE

1 A small Negro girl develops from the sheet of glare-frosted walk,

2 walking barefooted,

3 her brown legs striking and recoiling from the hot cement,

4 her feet curling in,

5 only the outer edges touching.

[student writing]

B2. MULTILEVEL SUBORDINATE SEQUENCE PARAGRAPH

1 The process of learning is essential to our lives.

2 All higher animals seek it deliberately.

3 They are inquisitive and they experiment.

4 An experiment is a sort of harmless trial run of some action which we shall have to make in the real world; and this, whether it is made in the laboratory by scientists or by fox-cubs outside their earth.

5 The scientist experiments and the cub plays; both are learning to correct their errors of judgment in a setting in which errors are not fatal.

6 Perhaps this is what gives them both their air of happiness and freedom in these activities.

J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science

The analytical procedure for discovering the structure is really quite simple. There is no problem in locating the base clause of a sentence, and one can assume—provisionally--that the first sentence of a paragraph is the topic sentence. Then, going sentence by sentence through the paragraph, one searches in the sentences above for likenesses, i.e., for evidence of coordination. In both sets of two examples, the second element is unlike the first one; it is different, and so it is set down as subordinate, i.e., it is indented and labeled Level 2....

In the examples [above] marked A1 and A2, the third element is like the second, it is parallel to the second, and so it is set down as coordinate. The clearest mark of coordination is identity of structure [parallel structure] at the beginning of the sentence. The fourth element is like both the second and third; and the fifth is like the second, third, and fourth. All the sentences labeled Level 2 have the same relation to one another .... And because of this, they all have the same immediate relation to Level 1, the base clause or topic sentence....

In the examples [above] marked B1 and B2, on the other hand, the third sentence is unlike the second, and of course unlike the first; the fourth is unlike the third or any other sentence above it, and so on. Search as you may, you will find no signs of parallelism.... No sentence after the second is related immediately to the sentence at Level 1; it is related to it only through all of the intermediate sentences.

5. THE TWO SORTS OF SEQUENCE [COORDINATE AND SUBORDINATE] COMBINE TO PRODUCE THE COMMONEST SORT, THE MIXED SEQUENCE.

Simple sequences, especially coordinate ones, are not common. More often than not, subordinate sentences are added to add depth to coordinate sequences, and coordinate sentences are added to emphasize points made in subordinate sequences. The resulting mixed sequences reveal their origin as derived from either coordinate or subordinate sequences.

My justification for the term "generative" lies in the addition of subordinate sentences to clarify and of coordinate sentences to emphasize or to enumerate....

C. MIXED SEQUENCE-BASED ON COORDINATE SEQUENCE

1 The other [mode of thought] is the scientific method.

2 It subjects the conclusions of reason to the arbitrament of hard fact to build an increasing body of tested knowledge.

2 It refuses to ask questions that cannot be answered, and rejects such answers as cannot be provided except by Revelation.

2 It discovers the relatedness of all things in the universe, of the motion of the moon to the influence of the earth and sun, of the nature of the organism to its environment, of human civilization to the conditions under which it is made.

2 It introduces history into everything.

3 Stars and scenery have their history, alike with plant species or human institutions, and nothing is intelligible without some knowledge of its past. 4 As Whitehead has said, each event is the reflection or effect of every other event, past as well as present.

2 It rejects dualism.

3 The supernatural is in part the region of the natural that has not yet been understood, in part an invention of human fantasy, in part the unknowable.

3 Body and soul are not separate entities, but two aspects of one organization, and Man is that portion of the universal world-stuff that has evolved until it is capable of rational and purposeful values.

4 His place in the universe is to continue that evolution and to realize those values.

Julian Huxley, Man in the Modern World

This paragraph suggests careful calculation of what could be left to the reader to figure out and what must be made more explicit.... What he added to the fifth, seventh, and ninth sentences made the paragraph a mixed one. He was under no obligation to expand equally all of the sentences at Level 2. The writer's guide is his own sense of what the reader must be told, and in how much detail....

D. MIXED SEQUENCE-BASED ON COORDINATE SEQUENCE

1 An obvious classification of meaning is that based on scope.

1 This is to say, meaning may be generalized (extended, widened) or it may be specialized (restricted, narrowed).

2 When we increase the scope of a word, we reduce the elements of its contents.

3 For instance tail (from OE taegl) in earlier times seems to have meant 'hairy caudal appendage, as of a horse.

4 When we eliminated the hairiness (or the horsiness) from the meaning, we increased its scope, so that in Modern English the word means simply "caudal appendage."

4 The same thing has happened to Danish hale, earlier "tail of a cow."

5 In course of time the cow was eliminated, and in present-day Danish the word means simply "tail," having undergone a semantic generalization precisely like that of the English word cited; the closely related Icelandic hali still keeps the cow in the picture.

3 Similarly, a mill was earlier a place for making things by the process of grinding, that is, for making meal.

4 The words meal and mill are themselves related, as one might guess from their similarity.

5 A mill is now simply a place for making things: the grinding has been eliminated, so that we may speak of a woolen mill, a steel mill, or even a gin mill.

3 The word corn earlier meant "grain" and is in fact related to the word grain.

4 It is still used in this general sense in England, as in the "Corn Laws," but specifically it may mean either oats (for animals) or wheat (for human beings).

4 In American usage corn denotes maize, which is of course not at all what Keats meant in his "Ode to a Nightingale" when he described Ruth as standing "in tears amid the alien corn."

3 The building in which corn, regardless of its meaning, is stored is called a barn.

4 Barn earlier denoted a storehouse for barley; the word is in fact a compound of two Old English words, here "barley" and aern, "house."

5 By elimination of a part of its earlier content, the scope of this word has been extended to mean a storehouse for any kind of grain.

5 American English has still further generalized by eliminating the grain, so that barn may mean also a place for housing livestock.

Thomas Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language

Here the development has proceeded so far that the four coordinate sentences (Level 3) have become in effect subtopic sentences. The paragraph could be subdivided, making them the topic sentences of a series of paragraphs....

E. MIXED SEQUENCE-BASED ON SUBORDINATE SEQUENCE

1 Science as we know it indeed is a creation of the last three hundred years.

2 It has been made in and by the world that took its settled shape about 1660, when Europe at last shook off the long nightmare of religious wars and settled into a life of inquisitive trade and industry.

3 Science is embodied in those new societies; it has been made by them and has helped to make them.

4 The medieval world was passive and symbolic; it saw in the forms of nature the signatures of the Creator.

4 From the first stirrings of science among the Italian merchant adventurers of the Renaissance, the modern world has been an active machine.

5 That world became the everyday world of trade in the seventeenth century, and the interests were appropriately astronomy and the instruments of voyage, among them the magnet.

5 A hundred years later, at the Industrial Revolution, the interest shifted to the creation and use of power.

6 This drive to extend the strength of man and what he can do in a day's work has remained our interest since.

7 In the last century it moved from steam to electricity.

7 Then in 1905, in that wonderful year when . . . he published papers which made outstanding advances in three different branches of physics, Einstein first wrote down the equations which suggested that matter and energy are interchangeable states.

7 Fifty years later, we command a reservoir of power in matter almost as large as the sun, which we now realize manufactures its heat for us in just this way, by the annihilation of its matter.

J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science

Conventionally, the "movement" of this paragraph might be called chronological; but it is only roughly so; it leaps, and at levels 4, 5, and 7 it lingers. Note the marks of coordination: level 4, the medieval . . . passive; the modern . . . active; level 5, the seventeenth century: a hundred years later; level 7, depending on since at level 6, in the last century: then in 1905: fifty years later.