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• Classic-Fiction

R = restriction -> qualifies, further defines, limits claims; happens at various points in the paragraph

P = paraphrasing -> restates claims and evidence to analyze them

I = illustration -> provides substantiating evidence

EXP = explains the illustrations, draws out meaning of evidence

Th = thesis restatement -> offers versions of an evolving thesis

Tr = transitional wording -> links sentences, connects ideas inside paragraph but also connects paragraph to what precedes and follows it

SW = answers “So what?”-> tells readers the purpose of the paragraph, why the writer bothered to tell them this

Let’s look at a paragraph to see what some of the sentences are doing. We have labeled some of the sentences (in square brackets) according to our expanded version of Becker’s marking scheme.

[T:] Armin Schnider, a neurologist from the Cantonal University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, says that the vast majority of confabulations he has heard from his patients over the years relate directly to their earlier lives. [I:] One of his patients, a retired dentist, worried while in hospital that he was keeping his patients waiting. [I:] Another, an elderly woman, talked regularly about her baby in the present tense. [EXP:] Most of these patients had damage to the temporal lobes of the brain, particularly the memory regions of the hippocampus, so it seemed likely that they had somehow lost the ability to make new memories and were retrieving old ones instead. [EXP:] The intriguing thing was that they didn’t realize these memories were old — they seemed convinced by their stories, and sometimes even acted on them. [SW:] So Schnider decided to study their memory in more detail. (Helen Phillips, “Everyday Fairytales,” New Scientist, 7 October 2006)

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Try This 15.4: Label the Function of the Sentences in a Paragraph

One of the best ways to understand how paragraphs work—to apprehend them as tools of thought and to be able to deploy them to work for you—is to assign the abbreviations in our list above to any paragraph in anything you have written or read, including this book.

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Paragraph Structure #2: Observation -> Implication -> Conclusion

One of the models described in this book for the analytical movement of mind is as follows: Observation → So what? → implication → So what? → tentative conclusions. This sequence goes beyond the simplest kind of paragraph development—idea + illustration—because it contains more of the writer’s thinking on how he or she reasons to the claim from evidence. Explicitly drawing out the implications of evidence complicates, but also more accurately represents the process of thinking, than does simply attaching examples to the idea they support.

One example of this model of mental movement appears earlier in this book, in the section of Chapter 2 entitled “Asking So What?” Not all paragraphs in an analytical paper move in this way, but a significant number of them do. We reprint the paragraph here, adding annotations about what the paragraph does.

[Paragraph opens with empirical observation:] If you look closely at Camilo Vergara’s photo of Fern Street, Camden, 1988, you’ll notice a sign on the side of a dilapidated building that reads “Danger: Men Working - W. Hargrove Demolition.”

[Implication:] Perhaps that warning captures the ominous atmosphere of these very different kinds of photographic documents by Camilo Vergara and Edward Burtynsky: “Danger: Men Working.” Watch out—human beings are at work! [Topic sentence:] But the work that is presented is not so much a building-up as it is a tearing-down—the work of demolition. [Qualification of claim:] Of course, demolition is often necessary in order to construct anew: old buildings are leveled for new projects, whether you are building a highway or bridge in an American city or a dam in the Chinese countryside.

[Paraphrasing—interpretive restatement:] You might call modernity itself, as so many have, a process of creative destruction, a term used variously