Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [221]
2 Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain.
3 These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. (Steven Pinker, “The Mystery of Consciousness,” Time, January 19, 2007)
Go back now and look at our first example (above) of a coordinate paragraph—the one about paragraph breaks being a relief. Are there any sentences in that paragraph that we might have classified as subordinate? What about the last sentence, for example? Notice that it clearly refers back to the topic sentence because it explains what paragraph indentations do to help readers. But it is also true that this last sentence evolves out of the sentence that immediately precedes it by developing the idea of transitions (“connecting words” “overt connections”) and restatement of “key ideas.” So we might have labeled that last sentence as level 2.
This kind of ambiguity should not concern you. It is less important to be able to accurately and precisely locate each sentence in a paragraph as coordinate or subordinate than it is to begin to recognize that most paragraphs are some kind of mix of these two thought patterns. In practice, as Christensen observes, most paragraphs combine coordinate and subordinate sequences, although one of the two structures often predominates. Consider, for example, the following paragraph, where we have explained in square brackets our reasons for labeling the sentences as we did.
[Topic sentence:] Imagery may be necessary for human imagination.
1 It has been suggested that all the products of the imagination are derived from imagery, following some transformation of the basic imagery. [restates and slightly expands topic sentence]
1 For example, Rutgers’ psychologist Alan Leslie, when he worked in London in the 1980s, proposed that imagination essentially involves three steps: [sets up example of the transformation process that is necessary for the human imagination]
[The next moves in the paragraph lay out the psychologist’s three steps; they are still supporting the topic sentence, but refer back more directly to the sentence immediately above them. Christensen describes this move as a subordinate sequence.]
2 Take what he called a ‘primary’ representation (which, as we have already established, is an image that has truth relations to the outside world).
2 Then make a copy of this primary representation (Leslie calls this copy a ‘second-order’ representation).
2 Finally, one can then introduce some change to this second-order representation, playing with its truth relationships to the outside world without jeopardising the important truth relationships that the original, primary representation needs to preserve.
1 For Leslie, when you use your imagination, you leave your primary representation untouched (for important evolutionary reasons that we will come onto), but once you have a photocopy of this (as it were), you can do pretty much anything you like with it.” [Having laid out the transformative process in the middle of the paragraph, the writer is now free to finish the paragraph with a summative sentence that more fully spells out why imagery is necessary to the imagination.] (Simon Baron-Cohen, “The Biology of Imagination,” Entelechy: Mind & Culture summer/fall 2007 no. 9)
You do not need to ponder these relationships each time you write a new sentence in a paragraph, but, when you find yourself getting stuck in your writing, you can help yourself to move forward by thinking about which sentence in the paragraph is the actual generator (or jumping off point) for the next one.
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Try This 15.5: Arrange Coordinate and Subordinate Sequences
Go back to the paragraph that we used to illustrate our expanded version of Becker’s TRI model. Try to arrange the sentences according