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Seminars
&
email courses
Paragraphing
“Write in sentences, but think in
paragraphs”
“Structuring your paragraphs so that the reader gets the point”
“Use
paragraphs for four Cs:
clarity, coherence, control, & credibility”
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Seminars &
email courses
Write in sentences, but think in paragraphs
by Stephen Wilbers
Author of 1,000 columns
published in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune & elsewhere
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"Here’s your
strongest paragraph," I said to a young writer last week, "and this one is
your weakest." "What’s the
difference?" the writer asked.
She was a bright, capable employee,
known for her rapport with customers, but her writing was weak. She had
been told that it was not "business-like," that it sometimes lacked
organization and emphasis, and her manager had asked me to work with her.
"This paragraph states its topic and
comes to a conclusion," I said. "This one doesn’t."
Her problem was not wording. She had a
good vocabulary and a good ear for language. Her style was fluent and
natural. Her problem was paragraph structure.
She laughed when she read over the weak
paragraph.
"You know, I didn’t really know what I
was trying to say there, so I just went on."
I told her that paragraphs come in all
sizes and shapes, but whenever you feel you’re losing focus, go back to
the basic paragraph structure: topic, development, resolution.
The third component is key. State your
conclusion. Don’t make your reader guess. One advantage of this approach
is that it encourages clarity in your own thinking.
"Now look at your strong paragraph," I
said. "You present a number of ideas, but each is clearly related to your
main point. The connections are clear, and you come to a definite
conclusion."
As Strunk and White advise in The
Elements of Style, make the paragraph your basic unit of composition.
Every point in a paragraph should be clearly linked to your main purpose.
With this approach, writing becomes a process of constructing and
arranging these building blocks into a coherent whole.
As I often tell writers in my seminars,
write in sentences, but think in paragraphs. It’s at the level of the
paragraph – not the sentence – that your strategy and organization are
carried out.
Consider the following incomplete
paragraph: "Customers seem unimpressed with our new product. They think
it’s too expensive."
Now add a resolution statement: "Let’s
review our pricing strategy."
Consider this paragraph about wilderness
preservationist Ernest Oberholtzer by Louise Erdrich in
Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country:
"He was born in 1884, grew up in an
upper middle-class home in Davenport, Iowa, suffered a bout of rheumatic
fever that weakened his heart. He went to Harvard, where he made friends
with bookish people like Conrad Aiken and Samuel Eliot Morison. His heart
kept bothering him. Told by a doctor he had just one year to live, he
decided to spend it in a canoe. He traveled three thousand miles in a
summer. Paddling a canoe around the Rainy Lake watershed and through the
Quetico-Superior wilderness was just the thing for his heart, so he kept
on paddling. He lived to be ninety-three years old."
In one sharply drawn paragraph,
organized around the theme of a weakened heart, Erdrich summarizes a man’s
life. Her structure: topic, development, resolution.
If your writing seems to lack focus,
take a look at your paragraph structure. |
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Top
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Seminars &
email courses
Structuring
your paragraphs so that the reader gets the point
By Stephen Wilbers
Author of 1,000 columns
published in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune & elsewhere
|
Good things come in threes.
Messages should have a beginning, a
middle, and an end. In speeches you should tell them what you’re going to
say, say it, and tell them what you’ve said. And in paragraphs you should
organize your information by topic, development, and resolution.
One, two, three.
Consider the following paragraph
about how demands for greater productivity are taking a toll on workers,
adapted from an article by Alana Semuels:
“In their zeal to make sure that not
a minute of time is wasted, companies are imposing rigorous performance
quotas, forcing many people to put in extra hours, paid or not. As a
result, many workers are wondering how much longer they can keep up the
breakneck pace. Video cameras and software keep tables on work
performance, tracking their computer keystrokes and the time spent on each
customer service call. The relentless drive for efficiency at U.S.
companies has created a new harshness in the workplace.”
Hard to follow, isn’t it? That’s
because I scrambled the order of its four sentences.
To create coherence and flow in your
writing, organize your paragraphs into three components: topic,
development, resolution.
Following that formula, see if you
can number the four sentences of the scrambled paragraph in the order in
which they originally appeared. If you’re reading this column on hard
copy, you can write on your newspaper. If you’re reading this online, it’s
fine to find an indelible marker and write right on your screen.
Hint #1:
The topic sentence usually states the unifying theme of the paragraph.
Hint #2:
The second component in a paragraph, the development, often consists of a
sentence that clarifies, elaborates, or expands on the topic sentence,
followed by an example.
Hint #3:
It’s a pretty good bet that sentences beginning with phrases such as in
conclusion, consequently, and as a result come at the end.
Hint #4:
If you just wrote on your computer screen with an indelible marker, you
might want to make sure your company doesn’t have a video camera pointed
in your direction. (Also, what are doing reading this column on company
time, anyway?)
Here’s how the paragraph was
originally written:
“The relentless drive for efficiency
at U.S. companies has created a new harshness in the workplace. In their
zeal to make sure that not a minute of time is wasted, companies are
imposing rigorous performance quotas, forcing many people to put in extra
hours, paid or not. Video cameras and software keep tables on work
performance, tracking their computer keystrokes and the time spent on each
customer service call. As a result, many workers are wondering how much
longer they can keep up the breakneck pace.”
Note how the clarifying sentence is
followed by an example. Much easier to read, isn’t it?
This three-part formula has another
important application. By modifying it slightly to purpose, background,
proposed action, you can use it to organize your messages.
Remember: Beginning, middle, end.
Topic, development, resolution. Purpose, background, proposed action.
It’s as easy as one, two, three.
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Seminars &
email courses
Use
paragraphs for four Cs:
clarity, coherence, control, & credibility
By Stephen Wilbers
Author of 1,000 columns
published in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune & elsewhere
|
I do love my iPhone. I do love my
computer. I do love the Internet.
I love their power and speed and
instantaneous access to information. I love the things they do for me. I
love the way they guide me to my destination, highlight my errors, and
suggest alternative word choices. I love the way they let my father see
his only great grandchild and hear her sweet newborn sounds six weeks
before he died.
I do hereby profess my affection for
– and near total dependence on – these devices and technologies. I make
this declaration so that you won’t think me a Luddite for writing another
column on how these technologies may be undermining your ability to
communicate.
But, in fact, they may be.
There’s nothing inherently wrong
with quick, short communication, no more than it’s wrong to occasionally
use a one-sentence paragraph to create emphasis (as I did with the
previous paragraph). Texting is concise and to the point, and dropping in
a one-sentence paragraph varies the pace. But if all you ever write are
quick, disjointed messages and one-sentence paragraphs, you may be losing
your ability to organize your thought into longer, logically developed
arguments. You may be losing your ability to think deeply.
Carefully structured paragraphs are
the building blocks of writing. They give us the four Cs of effective
communication: clarity, coherence, control, and credibility.
Clarity
If you want the reader to follow
your thought, you need to do three things: Tell the reader where you’re
going, present your information or explain your thinking, and offer your
conclusion. In brief exchanges, with the context established, this
three-part structure may not be needed, but for more substantive,
deliberate, thoughtful writing, it’s essential. The three-part paragraph
provides a roadmap: topic, development, resolution.
Coherence
Paragraphs help you connect your
thoughts. A paragraph may contain a number of points, but every point is
linked to a unifying theme and every sentence supports the main purpose.
After you have drafted your document, you can check its organization by
reading the first sentence of each paragraph. Have you created a logical
progression? Have you repeated yourself? Have you omitted a key point?
Control
These building blocks of composition
help you set your pace and control your emphasis. Shorter paragraphs
create a faster pace and a less formal style. Longer paragraphs create a
slower pace and a more formal style. Because first and last sentences have
natural prominence, key points go there. Quotations normally work best in
these locations. In legal writing, positive information is presented first
and last; negative information is buried in the middle.
Credibility
Credibility results from multiple
factors: command of language, knowledge of subject, rapport with audience,
word choice, sentence structure, and – perhaps surprisingly –
paragraphing. To write in paragraphs is to demonstrate how your mind
works. When the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address is
rendered in PowerPoint, their power is lost. Outline format presents
information but fails to convey an essential element: quality of mind,
sometimes called “voice” in writing.
Write in sentences, but think in
paragraphs. |
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