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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 to levels—coordinate and subordinate. Which sentences in the paragraph form a coordinate sequence with the topic sentence? Are there any sentences in the paragraph that, rather than being generated by the topic sentence instead clarify or comment on the one that precedes it?

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Try This 15.6: Identify the Structure of Paragraphs

Take each of the paragraphs below and apply the terms offered in this section to describe what various sentences do. Look for coordinate versus subordinate structures, but more specifically, label the mental moves performed by individual sentences. We have numbered the sentences to make the paragraphs easier to work with.

Paragraph A:

What does it mean for a nation to advance?

In one view, it means to increase its gross domestic product per capita.

For decades that measure has been the standard used by development economists, as if it were a proxy for a nation’s overall quality of life.

Never mind about distribution and social equality; never mind about the preconditions of stable