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.
Labels: rhetoric
Young Entrepreneurs e-book available FREE!
Four years of blogging on the subject of young entrepreneurs and their interests (or what they should be interested in) have been condensed into start me up! Young Entrepreneurs, the e-book.
It's available FREE. But it's a 10 MB Microsoft Word file. You have to want it. And if you use any of it, you have to attribute what you use to me. It's for educational purposes, but I still want my credit.
And I'm starting to take down the old posts too, since most of them are in the book. I will leave up just a few of the best. But it's time for me to clean up my Web site. In a few years, GTFW willing, there'll be a follow-up book. :-)
FOLLOW-UP: A wiki, eh...? That's not a bad idea... I will look into that. But it won't be posted on my Web site. I put the book together in the first place to clear some old pages out of the Web site. And I have no problem with users editing it to suit their needs, as long as I get original credit.
Labels: education, rhetoric, young entrepreneurs
It's nice to be appreciated...
I got the following e-mail a couple weeks back, and only now have I fully come to appreciate it:
We recently published "Hidden Gems: The 100 .edu sites every Entrepreneur Should Read". I am happy to let you know that your site has been included in the list.
I figured I'd bring it to your attention in case you think your readers would find it useful.
Well, yeah, it's useful if for no other reason that that we're in there. LOL Here I am, a lowly underworked adjunct at a Division III college, and my blog is potentially as important to entrepreneurs as maybe 100 other college and university Web sites with more people attached to them. It IS nice to be appreciated! Cheers!
Labels: young entrepreneurs
Paralysis by Paralysis
I used to hear the old saw "paralysis by analysis," referring to engineers keeping product from shipping because of needing more analysis. Well, OK. But it turns out that we all have a similar phenomenon we have to deal with sometimes. This "paralysis by paralysis" is marked by an inability to decide what to do next. We're frozen in place while we figure it out. We're afraid of doing the wrong thing. We may have forgotten something important, and so we go on a desperate search for a lost memory. And in between, we hit this really annoying period of total confusion. Sound familiar?
You might ask yourself:
- Which is worse: to do the wrong thing, or to do nothing at all?
- If I were prepared for my next action, what difference would it make?
- Is it better to ask forgiveness than permission?
This paralysis will leave you with the shivers, because the boss might come along.
- What happens then, if you do a good thing, but it's the wrong good thing, and the boss asks what's going on with the right good thing?
- What happens if you're paralyzed, doing nothing, and the boss comes along?
Action leads to more action -- as long as good deeds go unpunished. LOL The same way, inaction leads to more inaction, though with short bursts of misplaced, unappreciated fanaticism.
You've got to overcome this!There is no substitute for planning and prioritizing.
- Take maybe 15 minutes at the start of the day to figure out what tasks will give you the biggest payoff. Those are the tasks you concentrate on.
- And you've got to commit to following the payoff, and concentrating on those high-payoff tasks.
- Take maybe 15 minutes at the end of the day -- you're winding down by then anyway -- to examine yourself and the payoff on your tasks, and ask yourself whether you did the right thing. If the answer is no, then you can think about how you might have misjudged what makes a big payoff.
- Be willing to hold on to some discipline and see what happens. If nothing else, your patience will make you stronger.
- If you feel paralysis coming on, and you fear the coming of the boss, then take pre-emptive action: go see the boss, and get clarification on a couple of tasks. Let the boss prioritize for you. It'll not only get you off dead center, but it'll delay the boss's next visit.
- Don't forget: some actions have to be taken, and some jobs finished, before we can really see what's next. What you think may be an order of events may be masked by something that has to be done up front.
Labels: recommendations, rhetoric
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