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by locating significant patterns of repetition and contrast. What is the pattern of repeated words in the paragraph above this one, for example? Notice the repetition of the key word “gap,” which goes with the idea of falling and which is in opposition to such words as “connection” and “train of thought.” The other connecting feature of the paragraph comes with its repeated use of questions. The paragraph you are now reading gets its sense of purpose from the previous paragraph’s questions. Here we start answering them.

Sometimes (but not always) the connecting logic that helps readers negotiate the gaps between sentences must be made explicit. So, for example, some sentences begin with the words, “So, for example.” The function of this type of connection is illustration. Some other words that operate in this gap-bridging way are “thus,” “furthermore,” “in addition,” “similarly,” “in other words,” and “on the contrary.”

When the organizing principle of a paragraph is sufficiently evident, explicit transitional words are often not needed. If parallelism is the paragraph’s organizing principle, for example, readers will be able to see the relationship among the paragraph’s sentences without a lot of repetition of connecting words.

WHAT A PARAGRAPH DOES: THE PARAGRAPH AS MOVEMENT OF MIND

The key to understanding how to write paragraphs, as well as how to analyze what you read in them, is to focus on what the various sentences in a paragraph do. To follow what a paragraph does is to follow its succession of sentences as a movement of mind, an unfolding of consciousness on the page that conveys to readers the relationships among its various pieces of information. If you can keep this idea in mind, seeing paragraphs as possessing behavior—actively shaping thought and communicating it to imagined readers—your writing will improve.

The sentences in a paragraph have different jobs; there is a distribution of labor. To see this element of paragraphing, it is essential that you “look beyond content”; that is, you need to focus on what the sentences are doing, not just on what they are saying. In Chapter 8, Reasoning from Evidence to Claims, we ask you to distinguish which sentences in a paragraph were evidence and which were claims, and to mark these with an E or a C. Those are two functions of sentences in paragraphs—two tasks that sentences in a paragraph can perform.

As this chapter has already suggested, there are other functions as well. Here are some roles sentences play in paragraphs:

link one idea to another

link evidence to a claim

qualify the major claim (the thesis)

paraphrase the major claim (restating and querying the key terms in order to figure out what they imply)

operate as transitions, linking the paragraph to the one that precedes it and to the overall idea the paper is developing

Paragraph Structure #1: Topic Sentence, Restriction, Illustration

One model for thinking about paragraph structure comes from the rhetorician Alton Becker: Topic sentence (T), Restriction (R) and Illustration (I). The topic sentence states some kind of claim—an idea that the paragraph will develop in some way. This may or may not appear as the first sentence of the paragraph, and there may be more than one claim in the paragraph, although one of these is usually primary. Restriction limits the claim in some way. Illustration supplies examples in support of the claim.

As our earlier discussions of thesis and evidence have suggested, evidence does more than just support claims; when we consider how evidence does not match the claim, we are led to qualify (shrink, restrict) the claim. This process of asserting ideas and then restricting them also goes on, often repeatedly, at the level of the paragraph.

The TRI model does not cover everything that goes on in various kinds of paragraphs, but it is a good way to start looking at paragraphs in order to begin thinking about what the sentences do. Here is a somewhat expanded list of jobs that sentences may do inside paragraphs.

What Sentences Do Inside Paragraphs

T