Wednesday, November 28, 2007

On writing paragraphs

I was looking over several sites that talk about types of paragraphs and how to write them. It won't surprise you to hear that nearly all of these sites exist mainly to serve young American kids -- that there's almost nothing about the subject for working professionals. The surprise is that there isn't much there for internationals who are learning English. So I put my TESL cap on.

I have six major types of paragraphs, and I have a mnemonic device to help me remember them. My NASA experience tells me that actual words make the best acronyms and acrostics. :-) :-) :-)

So new acronym is FENCES, and the contents look like this:
  • FEATURES and details
  • supporing EVIDENCE and reasons
  • NARRATIVES, anecdotes and examples
  • COMPARISON or contrast
  • cause and EFFECT
  • SEQUENCES
You may have ample experience in writing paragraphs of each type, so it may not be necessary to go into the fine differences among these. I might have to in the classroom, though. Consider what young people learn about paragraphs in school, even as they prepare for standardized tests:
  • sentence to introduce a subtopic
  • three sentences to develop it
  • sentence to summarize the rest of the paragraph
I don't think this structure works very well in a professional setting, or even in college. There are too many different things to write, as you see in FENCES above. And there are some documents that may require every type of paragraph on the list, such as business plans and failure investigation reports... and those are just two I actually know something about.

So I'm just going to toss out a couple of other paragraph features I like to use beyond what's taught to high-schoolers, and you decide if I left anything out.

I believe lists should be treated in list formats, not embedded in a simple narrative or descriptive text. My cutoff is three items on a list. If I have three or fewer, and they're short, I'll just bury them in the prose. but otherwise it's bullets or numbers.

And I think it's kind of a waste to use the last sentence of a paragraph just to summarize. I think a more profitable use is as a segueway to the next thing. I mean, if you CAN. We can't always. But that's the way novelists and short-story writers use that sentence -- as a bridge to the first sentence of the next paragraph.

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posted by Ron @ 12:38 PM

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