Lesson one

1. Lesson one • Text types, continued • Structure and function of paragraphs • Text discussion • Writing assignment

2. Building a text • Words • Clauses/sentences • Paragraphs • Texts

3. Paragraph Paragraphs are functional parts of a text. (Introduction, Development, Conclusion) They have internal structure. • Functional properties • Central parts

4. Functional properties • Unity (focused on a clear message) • Coherence (The information should ‘hang together’) • Progression/development (The text needs to go somewhere)

5. Lack of unity Club Palm Resort's beaches are beautiful, and the surrounding countryside is quite scenic. The quality of the food leaves a lot to be desired. Many vacationers enjoy the variety of outdoor activities and the instruction available in such sports as sailing and scuba diving. Unfortunately, security is poor; several vacationers' rooms have been broken into and their valuables stolen. Christmas in the Bahamas can make the thought of New Year's in Chicago bearable.

6. Unity For vacationers sick and tired of the frozen north, a week at Club Palm Resort can provide just the midwinter thaw they need. Club Palm Resort's beaches are beautiful, and the surrounding countryside is quite scenic. Many vacationers also enjoy the variety of outdoor activities and the instruction available in such sports as sailing and scuba diving. Christmas in the Bahamas can make the thought of New Year's in Minneapolis bearable.

7. Lack of coherence Limited investment in the housing sector makes it practically impossible to allocate sufficient resources for urban dwellers' housing needs. A high rate of urban population growth has increased the country's needs for housing. A small group of city officials has laid out a new plan to combat the crisis. A solution to the housing-shortage problem is a vital policy issue here. The housing problem has grown in the last twenty years.

8. Coherence Limited investment in the housing sector makes it practically impossible to allocate sufficient resources for urban dwellers' housing needs. In fact, the problem has grown in the last twenty years. Because a high rate of urban population growth has increased the country's needs for housing, a solution to the housing-shortage problem is a vital policy issue here. A small group of city officials has laid out a new plan to combat the crisis.

9. Lack of progression/development A vacation at Club Palm Resort has its good points and bad points. The beaches are nice, but they may not be enough for some vacationers.

10. Progression/Development A midwinter vacation at Club Palm Resort has its good points and bad points. The beaches are clean and uncrowded. The surrounding countryside is lush and soothing to winter-weary eyes. Furthermore, being able to take sailing and scuba diving lessons, while friends back home shovel snow, makes the outdoor activities extra-enjoyable. On the other hand, several features of Club Palm Resort are substandard. The food is poor, and, because the club is isolated, eating elsewhere is impossible. Security could also be better, as thefts from several guests' rooms indicated. So, for some vacationers, nice scenery and fun activities may not be enough to offset the possibility of poor service and lax security.

11. Topic The market for 3D printers and services is small, but growing fast. Last year it was worth $2.2 billion worldwide, up 29% from 2011, according to Wohlers Associates, a consultancy. As producers become more familiar with the technology, they are moving from prototypes to final products. Last year Wohlers reckons more than 25% of the 3D-printing market involved making production-ready items.

12. Supporting points The market for 3D printers and services is small, but growing fast. Last year it was worth $2.2 billion worldwide, up 29% from 2011, according to Wohlers Associates, a consultancy. As producers become more familiar with the technology, they are moving from prototypes to final products. Last year Wohlers reckons more than 25% of the 3D-printing market involved making production-ready items.

13. Concluding sentence The market for 3D printers and services is small, but growing fast. Last year it was worth $2.2 billion worldwide, up 29% from 2011, according to Wohlers Associates, a consultancy. As producers become more familiar with the technology, they are moving from prototypes to final products. Last year Wohlers reckons more than 25% of the 3D-printing market involved making production-ready items. Some of those parts are taking shape in RedEye’s printers.

14. Exercise During the next few weeks publishers will release a crush of books, pile them onto delivery lorries and fight to get them on the display tables at the front of bookshops in the run-up to Christmas. It is an impressive display of competitive commercial activity. It is also increasingly pointless. More quickly than almost anyone predicted, e-books are emerging as a serious alternative to the paper kind. Amazon, comfortably the biggest e-book retailer, has lowered the price of its Kindle e-readers to the point where people do not fear to take them to the beach. In America, the most advanced market, about one-fifth of the largest publishers’ sales are of e-books. Newly released blockbusters may sell as many digital copies as paper ones. The proportion is growing quickly, not least because many bookshops are closing. For readers, this is splendid. Just as Amazon collapsed distance by bringing a huge range of books to out-of-the-way places, it is now collapsing time, by enabling readers to download books instantly. Moreover, anybody can now publish a book, through Amazon and a number of other services. Huge choice and low prices are helping books hold their own on digital devices, even against “Angry Birds”. For publishers, though, it is a dangerous time. Book publishing resembles the newspaper business in the late 1990s, or music in the early 2000s. Although revenues are fairly stable, and the traditional route is still the only way to launch a blockbuster, the climate is changing. Some of the publishers’ functions—packaging books and promoting them to shops—are becoming obsolete. Algorithms and online recommendations threaten to replace them as arbiters of quality. The tide of self-published books threatens to swamp their products. As bookshops close, they lose a crucial showcase. And they face, as the record companies did, a near-monopoly controlling digital distribution: Amazon’s grip over the e-book market is much like Apple’s control of music downloads.

15. Paragraph one During the next few weeks publishers will release a crush of books, pile them onto delivery lorries and fight to get them on the display tables at the front of bookshops in the run-up to Christmas. It is an impressive display of competitive commercial activity. It is also increasingly pointless. More quickly than almost anyone predicted, e-books are emerging as a serious alternative to the paper kind.[…]

16. Paragraph two More quickly than almost anyone predicted, e-books are emerging as a serious alternative to the paper kind. Amazon, comfortably the biggest e-book retailer, has lowered the price of its Kindle e-readers to the point where people do not fear to take them to the beach. In America, the most advanced market, about one-fifth of the largest publishers’ sales are of e-books. Newly released blockbusters may sell as many digital copies as paper ones. The proportion is growing quickly, not least because many bookshops are closing. For readers, this is splendid.[…]

17. Paragraph three For readers, this is splendid. Just as Amazon collapsed distance by bringing a huge range of books to out-of-the-way places, it is now collapsing time, by enabling readers to download books instantly. Moreover, anybody can now publish a book, through Amazon and a number of other services. Huge choice and low prices are helping books hold their own on digital devices, even against “Angry Birds”. For publishers, though, it is a dangerous time. […]

18. Initial paragraph • What is the main idea of the paragraph? • What is the main function of the paragraph? • How is the paragraph structured? • What type of text is the paragraph taken from?

19. Example one WITHOUT them, life as we know it could not exist, yet the exact definition of the hydrogen bond - credited with keeping water liquid and giving DNA its signature helical shape - has always been fuzzy. Now these fundamental linkages have a new official definition that broadens the situations in which they can arise. It should allow various chemical reactions and behaviours to be better modelled and understood.

20. Example two IF YOU want to spot a liar, don't bother with a polygraph. They are notoriously unreliable. In a competition to find the world's most inappropriately named technology, the lie detector would be hard to beat.

21. Example three FOR a man who claims to lack expertise in the field, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an academic at New York University, has made some impressively accurate political forecasts. In May 2010 he predicted that Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, would fall from power within a year. Nine months later Mr Mubarak fled Cairo amid massive street protests. In February 2008 Mr Bueno de Mesquita predicted that Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, would leave office by the end of summer. He was gone before September. Five years before the death of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, Mr Bueno de Mesquita correctly named his successor, and, since then, has made hundreds of prescient forecasts as a consultant both to foreign governments and to America’s State Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies. What is the secret of his success? “I don’t have insights—the game does,” he says.

22. Example four Threats to global biodiversity from climate change (1-8) make it important to identify the rates at which species have already responded to recent warming. There is strong evidence that species have changed the timing of their life cycles during the year and that this is linked to annual and longer-term variations in temperature (9–12). Many species have also shifted their geographic distributions toward higher latitudes and elevations (13–17), but this evidence has previously fallen short of demonstrating a direct link between temperature change and range shifts; that is, greater range shifts have not been demonstrated for regions with the highest levels of warming.

23. Paragraph separationBlank line At first, this intriguing book appears to be a wander through the night written by a poet and essayist. There is a chapter on sunset, and then another for each subsequent hour of darkness. In the end, though, each chapter is merely a point of departure for a much more wide-ranging journey, through subjects such as astronomy, history, palaeontology, the arts, culture and mythology. The book is a portrait of darkness in all its forms. When the sun goes down, nocturnal creatures come out, children worry about monsters, and hormonal changes seep through our bodies. The night is the realm of ghosts, witches, dreams, bats, fireworks, prostitutes, northern lights, romance and the moon. Above all, it is the time when the imagination flows most freely and emotions seem more intense.

24. Paragraph separationIndentation At first, this intriguing book appears to be a wander through the night written by a poet and essayist. There is a chapter on sunset, and then another for each subsequent hour of darkness. In the end, though, each chapter is merely a point of departure for a much more wide-ranging journey, through subjects such as astronomy, history, palaeontology, the arts, culture and mythology. The book is a portrait of darkness in all its forms. When the sun goes down, nocturnal creatures come out, children worry about monsters, and hormonal changes seep through our bodies. The night is the realm of ghosts, witches, dreams, bats, fireworks, prostitutes, northern lights, romance and the moon. Above all, it is the time when the imagination flows most freely and emotions seem more intense.

25. DO NOT! At first, this intriguing book appears to be a wander through the night written by a poet and essayist. There is a chapter on sunset, and then another for each subsequent hour of darkness. In the end, though, each chapter is merely a point of departure for a much more wide-ranging journey, through subjects such as astronomy, history, palaeontology, the arts, culture and mythology. The book is a portrait of darkness in all its forms. When the sun goes down, nocturnal creatures come out, children worry about monsters, and hormonal changes seep through our bodies. The night is the realm of ghosts, witches, dreams, bats, fireworks, prostitutes, northern lights, romance and the moon. Above all, it is the time when the imagination flows most freely and emotions seem more intense.

26. Assignment – Paragraph writing • General subject are: Communication and technology • Find a specific topic within the general area • Should function as introductory paragraph of a text

27. To do • Decide on what the main thesis/topic of the paragraph (and text) should be and write it down. • Decide on what the general background and main points of the paragraph should be and write down the information as bullet points. • Plan how to develop your topic in a way that makes clear what your main point/points are, using supporting sentences. • Write the paragraph • The paragraph should function as the initial paragraph of a longer text and give the reader a good idea of what could be developed in the main body of the text. • Come up with a good title.

28. Example: Food and Lifestyle Thesis: The government should put a tax on unhealthy food Background and main points: • People in the western world are growing increasingly fatter. • The cause is a combination of unhealthy diet and lack of exercises. • Obesity causes suffering for the individual. • Healthcare costs for treating overweight people are skyrocketing. • A possible solution is to make unhealthy food more expensive.

29. Example paragraph Taxation as a diet Today, two-thirds of the American population is either overweight or obese, and the rest of the Western world is not far behind. Although the reasons for this development are many, it is clear that two main contributing factors are an increasing consumption of food with high fat and sugar content, and a more sedentary life-style. Not only does obesity cause great problems for the people suffering from overweight but it also costs the government large amounts of money. A solution to the problem is urgently needed and experience has taught us that the best way to achieve quick results is to put pressure on the part of peoples’ lives where they will feel it the most – their wallets.

30. Hand in • Deadline: Friday 11 September • Send by mail to: mikael.svensson@liu.se • Include your name in the Word-document • Use 1.5 line spacing

31. Study questions • What is the main message of this article? Is there anywhere in the article where this message is clearly stated? • What type of readers do you think the article is aimed at? • How would you characterise the style of the text in terms of being more or less formal? What in the texts do you base your view on? • How would you describe the new way of doing face-recognition presented in the article?

32. Study questions • What different applications of the new technology are mentioned in the article? What other application can you think of? • Are there any dangers with the ways the new technology can be used? • From what you have read in the article, when do you think this technology will be available for practical use?

33. Vocabulary • What other words could you use to express the meaning of “meaningful”? • What does “designated” mean in this context? • What is the difference between “technique” and “technology”? • What does “occlusion” mean? • What do you do when you “don something”? What things can you “don”? • What is meant by “secret sauce”? • What is meant by “compelling” and “confident”?

34. Vocabulary • What is a “constraint”? • What other word can you use to express the meaning of “render”? • What does it mean for something to be “obsolete”? • What does it mean that something “flies in the face of”? • In what context would you start a sentence with “nevertheless”? • What is the difference between “adopting” and “adapting”? • What is a “privacy advocate”?