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When to Paragraph The Brief Holt Handbook, 37. Begin a new paragraph whenever you move from one major point to another; Begin a new paragraph whenever you move your readers from one time period or location to another;
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When to ParagraphThe Brief Holt Handbook, 37 • Begin a new paragraph whenever you move from one major point to another; • Begin a new paragraph whenever you move your readers from one time period or location to another; • Begin a new paragraph every time you begin discussing a new step in a process; • Begin a new paragraph when you want to emphasize an important idea; • Begin a new paragraph every time a new person speaks; • Begin a new paragraph to signal the end of your introduction and the beginning of your conclusion;
Paragraph StandardsA Complete Course in Freshman English, 42. • A good paragraph contains a topic sentence, expressed or implied; • A good paragraph contains a body of thought, not a mere fragment. The well-developed paragraph is never sketchy or incomplete; • A good paragraph must be unified. Oneness of purpose is desirable; extraneous detail must be eliminated;
Paragraph Standards • A good paragraph contains full, unified material arranged in proper order. The sentences in it are so worded and arranged that they have a maximum appeal to the reader. Good arrangement of ideas implies logical thinking; • A good paragraph is well proportioned. If the thought of the paragraph is important, the paragraph should be so fully and completely developed that the reader can readily understand the significance of that thought. If the paragraph discusses an idea, or a group of related ideas, of comparatively less important, the proportion of the paragraph should reveal the difference in weight;
Paragraph Standards A good paragraph has suitable length. This statement implies what is said above under proportion; it also means that a series of short, choppy paragraphs, or a group of very long ones, should usually be avoided; • A good paragraph contains transitional aids. The thoughts within paragraphs should make orderly, clear progress, and there should be clear passage from one paragraph to another; • A good paragraph is mechanically correct. It is properly indented; it contains the words which belong with it, not with the preceding paragraph; in dialogue, it correctly represents every change of speaker.
Writing coherent paragraphs • A paragraph is coherent if al its sentences are logically related to one another. You can achieve coherence • 1. By arranging details according to an organizing principle and • 2. By using transitional words and phrases, • 3. By using parallel construction and • 4. By repeating key words and phrases.
How to Achieve Coherence? • Using parallel structure • Parallelism—the use of matching words, phrases, clauses or sentence structures to express similar ideas—can help increase coherence in a paragraph.
Parallel Clauses (sentences that begin with “he was…) • Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 and died at Monticello, Virginia, on July 4, 1826. During his eighty-four years he accomplished a number of things. Although best known for his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a man of many talents who had a wide intellectual range. He was a patriot who was one of the revolutionary founders of the United States. He was a reformer who when he was governor of Virginia drafted the Statue for Religious Freedom. He was an innovator who drafted an ordinance for governing the West and devised the first decimal monetary system. He was a president who abolished internal taxes, reduced the national debt, and mad the Louisiana Purchase. And finally he was an architect who designed Monticello and the University of Virginia. (Student Writer)
Repeating key words (Mercury) and phrases—those essential to meaning—throughout • Mercury poisoning is a problem that has long been recognized. “Mad as a hatter” refers to the condition prevalent among nineteenth-century workers who were exposed to mercury during the manufacturing of felt hats. Workers in many other industries, such as mining, chemicals, and dentistry, were similarly affected. In the 1950s and 1960s there were cases of mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan. Research showed that there were high levels of mercury pollution in streams and lakes surrounding the village. In the United States this problem came to light in 1969 when a new Mexico family got sick from eating food tainted with mercury. Since then pesticides containing mercury have been withdrawn from the market, and chemical wastes can no longer be dumped into the ocean. (Student Writer)
Coherence between paragraphs • Coherence between paragraphs • The methods you use to establish coherence within paragraphs may also be used to link paragraphs in an essay. In addition, you can use a transitional paragraph as a bridge between two paragraphs.
Well-developed paragraphs • A paragraph is well developed when it contains all the information—examples, statistics, expert opinion, and so on—that readers need to understand and accept the main idea. • Keep in mind that length does not determine whether a paragraph is well developed. The amount and kind of support you need depends on your audience, your purpose, and your paragraph’s main idea.
Arranging details Even if all a paragraph’s sentences are about the same subject, the paragraph lacks coherence if the sentences are not arranged according to a general organizing principle—that is, in spatial, chronological or logical order.
Spatial Order • Spatial order—establishes the perspective from which readers view details. For example, an object or scene can be viewed from left to right, from top to bottom or from near to far. Spatial order is central to descriptive paragraphs.
Chronological order • Presents details in time sequence, using transitional words and phrases that establish the sequence of events—at first, yesterday, later, and so on. Chronological order is central to narrative paragraph and process paragraphs.
Logical order • Presents details or ideas in terms of their logical relationships to one another. The ideas in a paragraph may move from general to specific, as in the conventional topic-sentence-at-the-beginning paragraph, or the ideas may progress from specific to general, as they do when the topic sentence appears at the end. A writer may also choose to begin with the least important idea and move to the most important.
Using transitional words and phrases • Transitional words and phrases clarify the relationships among sentences by establishing the spatial, chronological and logical connections within a paragraph.
Types of Paragraphs • Like the pattern of an entire essay, the pattern of a paragraph reflects the way a writer arranges ideas to express them more effectively. A well developed paragraph should be coherent, cohesive, and consistent by providing readers with all the relevant information—examples, statistics, citations from experts in the field and so on. Generally speaking, there are three ways to organize a paragraph: chronologically, spatially, and logically (inductive or deductive, cause or effect, etc.).
1. Narration • Narrative paragraphs tell a story. (Usually a narrative paragraph is organized in a chronological manner.) Transitional words and phrases move readers from one time period to another. • Do you present enough explanation to enable readers to understand the events you discuss? Do you support your main idea with descriptive details?
Story vs. Plot (E. M. Forster) Aspects of the Novel (1927) • The King died, and the queen died. (Story—chronologically connected) • The King died, and the queen died of grief. (Plot—connected by causality) • A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. • A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.
Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy and also the attitudes towards gender and homosexuality in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect". E. M. Forster(1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970)
2. Description • Descriptive paragraphs convey how something looks, sounds, smells, tastes or feels. Transitional words and phrases clarify spatial relationships. • Do you supply enough detail about what things look like, sound like, smell like, taste like, and feel like? Will your readers be able to visualize the person, object, or setting that your paragraph describes?
3. Exemplification • Exemplification paragraphsuse specific illustrations to clarify a general statement. Some exemplification paragraphs use several examples to support the topic sentence (other may develop a single extended example). • Do you present enough individual examples to support your paragraphs’ main diea? If you use a single extended example, is it developed in enough detail to enable reader to understand how it supports the paragraph’s main idea?
4. Process Paragraphs • Process paragraphs describe how something works, presenting a series of steps in chronological order. The topic sentence identifies the process, and the rest of the paragraph presents the steps involved. • Do you present enough steps to enable readers to understand the process is performed? Is the sequence of steps clear? If you are writing instructions, do you include enough explanation—including reminders and warnings—to enable readers to perform the process?
5. Cause-and-effect paragraphs • Cause-and-effect paragraphs explore why events occur and what happens as a result of them. • Do you identify enough causes (subtle as well as obvious, minor as well as major) to enable readers to understand why something occurred? Do you identify enough effects to show the significance of the causes and the impact they had?
6. Comparison and Contrast • Comparison and contrast paragraphs examine the similarities and differences between two subjects. Comparison emphasizes similarities whereas contrast emphasizes differences. • Comparison and contrast can be done in two ways: point-by-point: the paragraph alternates points about one subject with comparable points about the other subject. • Do you supply a sufficient number of details to illustrate and characterize each of the subjects in the comparison? Do you present a similar number of details for each subject? Do you discuss the same or similar details for each subject?
Comparison by Analogythat explains an unfamiliar concept or object by likening it to a familiar one • Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in child labor, holding their larvae like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television. (Lewis Thomas, “On Societies As Organisms”)
7. Division and Classification • Division paragraphs take a single item and break it into its components. Classification paragraphs take many separate items and group them into categories according to qualities or characteristics they share. • Do you present enough information to enable readers to identify each category and distinguish one from another?
Division • The blood can be divided into four distinct components: plasma, red cells, white cells, and platelets. Plasma is 90 percent water and holds a great number of substances in suspension. It contains proteins, sugars, fat, and inorganic salts. Plasma also contains urea and other by-products from the breaking down of proteins, hormones, enzymes, and dissolved gases. In addition, plasma contains the red blood cells that give it color, the white cells, the platelets. The red cells are most numerous; they get oxygen from the lungs and release it in the tissues. The less numerous white cells are part of the body’s defense against invading organisms. The platelets, which occur in almost the same number as white cells, are responsible for clotting. (Student Write)
Classification • Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, reflecting in 1830 on what he saw as the decline of science at the time, distinguished among three major kinds of scientific fraud. He called the first ‘forging,” by which he meat complete fabrication—the recording of observations that were never made. The second category he called “trimming”; this consists of manipulating the data to make them look better, or, as Babbage wrote, “in clipping of little bits here and there those observations which differ most in excess from the mean and in sticking them on to those which are too small. His third category was data selection, which he called “cooking”—the choosing of those data what fitted the researcher’s hypothesis and the discarding of those that did not. To this day, the serious discussion of scientific fraud has not improved on Babbage’s typology. (Morton Hunt, New York Times Magazine)
8. Definition • A formal definition includes the terms defined, the class to which it belongs, and the details that distinguish it from other members of its class. • Definition paragraph develop the formal definition with other patterns, defining happiness, for instance, by telling a story (narration), or defining a diesel engine by telling how it works (process). • Do you present enough support (examples, analogies, descriptive details, and so on) to enable readers to understand the term you are defining and to distinguish it from others in its class?
The following paragraph begins with a straightforward definition of gadget and then cites an example. • A gadget is nearly always novel in design or concept and it often has no proper name. For example, the semaphore which signals the arrival of the mail in our rural mailbox certainly has no proper name. It is a contrivance consisting of a piece of shingle. Call it what you like, it saves us frequent frustrating trips to the mailbox in winter when you have to dress up and wade into through snow to get there. That’s a gadget! (Smithsonian)
An introductory paragraph includes the subject, narrows it down and then states the essay’s thesis. • Checklist: Introductory paragraphs • Does your introduction include your essay’s thesis statement? • Does it lead naturally into the body of your essay? • Does it arouse your readers’ interest? • Does it avoid statements that simply announce your subject or that undercut your credibility?
Concluding Paragraphs • A concluding paragraph typically begins with specifics—for example, a review of your essay’s main points—and then moves to more general statements. Whenever possible, it should end with a sentence readers will remember. • Conclusions may also offer a prediction, a recommendation, a forceful opinion, or a pertinent quotation.
