8. How to Shape Effective Paragraphs

Unlike punctuation, which can be subjected to specific rules, no ironclad guidelines can be provided for shaping paragraphs. If you presented a text without paragraphs to a dozen academicians and asked them to break the document into logical sections, chances are that you would get twelve different opinions about the best places to put the paragraph breaks. In part, where paragraphs should be placed is a stylistic choice. Some writers prefer longer paragraphs that compare and contrast several related ideas, while others provide a more linear structure, delineating each subject point by point, paragraph by paragraph.
If your critics have not suggested that you take a hard look at how to organize your ideas, you may wish to skip the following discussion. After all, you wouldn’t take breathing lessons unless you had asthma or felt stressed out. Yet, if you are unsure about when you should begin a paragraph or how you should organize final drafts, then you may want to consider the following guidelines.
When you are drafting, trust your intuition about where to place paragraphs. You do not want to interrupt the flow of your thoughts to check on whether you are placing them in logical order. Such self_criticism could interfere with the flow of ideas that is important to being original and establishing a vigorous voice. Before submitting a document for publication, however, it generally makes sense to examine the structure of your paragraphs. Although the following guidelines are not ironclad, they can give you some insights about alternative ways to shape paragraphs.

PARAGRAPHS OFTEN FOLLOW A DEDUCTIVE ORGANlZATlON THAT MOVES FROM GIVEN TO NEW INFORMATION
Your goals for the opening sentences of your paragraphs are similar to your goals when writing an introduction to a document: in the beginning of a paragraph, you usually want to clarify its purpose. Most paragraphs in academic discourse move deductivel~that is, the first or second sentence presents the topic or theme of the paragraph, and the following sentences illustrate and explicate this theme. Notice, in particular, how Chris Goodrich cues readers to the purpose of his paragraph (and article) in the first sentence of his essay, “Crossover Dreams”:

Norman Cantor, New York University history professor and author, most recently of Inventing the Middle Ages, created a stir this spring when he wrote a letter to the newsletter of the American Historical Association declaring that “no historian who can write English prose should publish more than two books with a university press__one book for tenure, and one for full professor. After that (or preferably long before) work only in the trade market.” Cantor urged his fellow scholars to secure literary agents to represent any work with crossover potential. And he didn’t stop there: As if to be sure of offending the entire academic community, Cantor added, “If you are already a full professor, your agent should be much more important to you than the department chair or the dean.” (l)

Notice that it is not possible to simply rearrange the sentences in Goodrich’s introduction and preserve the same logic. Because the following violates the reader’s sense of order, it seems like gibberish:
As if to be sure of offending the entire academic community, Cantor added, “If you are already a full professor, your agent should be much more important to you than the department chair or the dean.” After that (or preferably long before) work only in the trade market.” Cantor urged his fellow scholars to secure literary agents to represent any work with crossover potential.

USE AN INDUCTIVE STRUCTURE FOR DRAMATIC CONCLUSIONS OR A VARIED STYLE
While you generally want to move from the known to the new, from the thesis to its illuslration or restriction, you sometimes want to violate this pattern. Educated readers in particular can be bored by texts that always present information in the same way. Note, for example, how Valerie Steele’s anecdotal tone and dialogue in the opening sentences to her essay on fashion in academia prepare the reader for her thesis:

Once, when I was a graduate student at Yale, a history professor asked me about my dissertation. “I’m writing about fashion,” I said.
“That’s interesting. Italian or German?”
It took me a couple of minutes, as thoughts of Armani flashed through my mind, but finally I realized what he meant. “Notfascism,” I said. “Fashion. As in Paris.”
“Oh.” There was a long silence, and then, without another word, he turned and walked away.
The F_word still has the power to reduce many academics to embarrassed or indignant silence. Some of those to whom I spoke while preparing this article requested anonymity or even refused to address the subject. (17)

PARAGRAPHS ARE USUALLY UNIFIED BY A SINGLE PURPOSE OR THEME
Regardless of whetherit is deductively or inductively structured, readers can generally follow the logic of a discussion better when a paragraph is unified by a single purpose. Paragraphs that lack a central idea and that wander from subject to subject are apt to confuse readers, making them wonder what they should pay attention to and how the different ideas relate to each other.
To ensure that each paragraph is unified by a single idea, Francis Christensen has suggested numbering sentences according to their level of generality, assigning a “ 1 “ to the most general sentence, a “2″ to the second most general sentence, and so on. Christensen considers the following paragraph, excerpted from J. Bronowski’s The Common Sense of Science, to be an example of a subordinate pattern because the sentences become increasingly specific as the reader progresses through the 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. (60)

Christensen is quick to point out that not all paragraphs have a subordinate structure. The following one, taken from Bergen Evans’s Comfortable Words, is an example of what Christensen considers a coordinate sequence:

1. He [the native speaker] may, of course, speak a form of English that marks him as coming from arural or an unread group.
2. But if he doesn’t mind being so marked, there’s no reason why he should change.
3. Samuel Johnson kept a Staffordshire burr in his speech all his life.
3. In Burns’s mouth the despised lowland Scots dialect served just as well as the “correct” English spoken by ten million of his southem contemporaries.
3. Lincoln’s vocabulary and his way of pronouncing certain words were sneered at by many better educated people at the time, but he seemed to be able to use the English language as effectively as his critics. (63)

EACH PARAGRAPH MUST RELATE LOGICALLY TO THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH(S)
Readers expect paragraphs to relate to each other as well as to the overall purpose of a text. Establishing transitional sentences for paragraphs can be one of the most difficult challenges you face a Writer because you need to guide the reader with a light hand. When you are too blatant about your transitions, your readers may feel patronized. To highlight the connections between your ideas, ~ou can provide transitional sentences at the end of each paragraph that look forward to the substance of the next paragraph. Also, you can place the transition at the beginning of the next paragraph, as Valerie Steele does in the following example:

Can a style of dress hurt one’s professional career? True to form, most academics deny that it makes any difference whatsoever. But a few stories may indicate otherwise: When a gay male professor was denied tenure at an Ivy League university, some people felt that he was penalized, in part, for his dress. It was “not that he wore multiple earrings” or anything like that, but he did wear”beautiful, expensive, colorful clothes that stood out” on campus. At the design department on one of the campuses of the University of California system, a job applicant appeared for her interview wearing a navy blue suit. The style was perfect for most departments, of course, but in this case she was told__to her face that she “didn’t fit in, she didn’t look arty enough.”
Another bit of evidence, that suggests dress is of career significance for academics is the fact that some universities (such as Harvard) now offer graduate students counseling on how to outfit themselves for job interviews. The tone apparently is patronizing (“You will need to think about an interview suit and a white blouse”), but the advice is perceived as necessary. (20)

When evaluating your transitions from idea to idea, question whether the transitions appear too obtrusive, thereby undercutting your credibility. At best, when unnecessary, readers perceive explicit transitional sentences to be wordy; at worst, they perceive such sentences as insulting (after all, they imply that the readers are too inept to follow the discussion).
VARY THE LENGTH OF PARAGRAPHS TO REFLECT THE COMPLEXITYAND IMPORTANCE OF THE IDEAS EXPRESSED IN THEM
Different ideas, arguments, and chronologies warrant their own paragraph lengths, so the form of your text should emerge in response to your thoughts. To emphasize a transition in your argument or to highlight an important point, you may want to place the critical information in a one_ or two_sentence paragraph.

CONSIDER YOUR GENRE AND THE VISUAL IMAGE OF THE PARAGRAPHS
As much as any of the above guidelines, you should consider the genre of your text. Paragraph length is influenced as much by the genre of the discourse as by the ideas being expressed. For instance, newspapers and magazines produced for high_school educated readers tend to require much shorter paragraphs than do academic journals. When evaluating how you have structured your ideas, however, pay attention to whether you have varied the length of your paragraphs. Long chunks of text without paragraph breaks tend to make ideas seem complicated, perhaps even inaccessible to less educated audiences. In turn, short paragraphs tend to create a listlike style, which intrudes on clarity and persuasive appeal. Because long paragraphs tend to make a document more complicated than short paragraphs, you should question how patient and educated your readers are.

FINAL COMMENTS
Paragraphs provide a visual representation of your ideas. When revising your work, evaluate the logic behind how you have organized the paragraphs. Would your presentation appear more logical and persuasive if you realTanged the paragraphs? Next, question the structure of each paragraph. To see if sentences need to be rearranged, detemline whether you are organizing information deductively or according to some sense of what is most and least important.

WORKS CITED

Christensen, Frances. Notes Toward a New Rhetoric. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
Goodrich, Chris. “Crossover Dreams: What Academics Need to Know about Agents and the Literary Marketplace.” Lingua Franca (August 1991): 1, 17_21.
Steele, Valerie. “The F_Word.” Lingua Franca (April 1991): 17_18, 20.