Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [219]
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 = topic sentence -> announces the main idea of the paragraph
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