Bulgarian art

Russell Banks

The Angel on the Roof
by Russell Banks


Dancing With My Eyes Closed

When I began writing nearly forty years ago, I wanted to be a poet, but had not the gift and fell in love instead with the short story, the form in prose closest to lyric poetry. Unable to court successfully the queen of the arts, I turned my attention to her lady-in-waiting. This is not a rare form of abandonment (as Faulkner famously observed, "All fiction writers are failed poets"), but in any event, it's clear enough to me why I abandoned poetry early, almost too early to have failed at it, for the short story. Too many of my close friends at college and shortly afterwards obviously had the gifts (of language, wit, personal charm, good looks--whatever it took to woo and win the favors of the queen's main muse), and by unavoidable comparison to poetry-writing friends like William Matthews, James Tate, and Charles Simic, I was tongue-tied, humorless, bad-mannered, and homely. No wonder I turned to prose fiction.
Before leaving, however, I did publish a fair number of those early poems in obscure--but not obscure enough- literary magazines and journals and published two chapbooks of poetry in small--but not small enough--editions. They show up now and then in the hands of collectors at book-signings, and it's all I can do to keep from tearing the book from the collector's hands and starting an auto-da-fe with it right there in the store. I'm not so much ashamed of those poor poems as embarrassed by the vanity of my youthful ambition, by its evident (to me, now) transparency, and am comforted a bit only by calling to mind Nathaniel Howthorne's first book, an absolutely awful bodice- ripper entitled Fanshawe, self-published in an edition of perhaps 500 copies that he spent his life afterwards quietly seeking out, purchasing, and destroying by fire, in the process (since he got all but a handful of copies) making it one of the rarest, most expensive books in American literature.
Unable to cohabit with lyric poetry, I, like my illustrious ancestor, took up temporary residence instead with her nearest neighbor, the short story, and only later moved across town as he did, to settle more or less permanently, I thought, with the novel. In the intervening years, though I've written a dozen or so novels and remain faithful to the form and its power, it's nonetheless the story form that thrills me. It invites me today, still, as it did those many years ago, to behave on the page in a way that is more reckless, more sharply painful, and more stylistically elaborate that is allowed by the steady, slow, bourgeois respectability of the novel, which, like a good marriage, demands long-term commitment, tolerance, and compromise. The novel, in order to exist at all, accrues, accretes, and accumulates itself in small increments, like a coral reef, and through that process invites from its creator leisurely exploration and slow growth. By contrast, stories are like a perfect wave, if one is a surfer; or a love affair, if one is a lover. They forgive one's mercurial nature, reward one's longing for ecstasy, and make of one's short memory a virtue. They keep an old man or woman young, so to speak.
A year ago, last winter, after a decade and a half of writing only novels--four of them, actually, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Boneand Cloudsplitter- arduous years uninterrupted by my usual, earlier practice of following a novel with a wild and crazy year or two of short-story writing (as a respite, I suppose, but also merely to release my brain from the sort of obsessional thinking that goes with novel-writing), I finally sat down and over the course of the next six months wrote nine new stories. I felt almost wanton and promiscuous. My delight, however, was tinged mysteriously with guilt. Maybe I'd been having too much fun, or perhaps, as if dancing wildly with my eyes closed, I had inadvertently made a fool of myself in public, revealed too much of my secret, subconscious self. Troubled and intrigued, I decided to examine and evaluate earlier instances of this reckless behavior and went back and, for the first time in many years, re-read my four previously published collections of stories, Searching for Survivors, The New World, Trailerpark, and Success Stories, a group of nearly one hundred stories in all.
Many of them, most of them, were terrible, as bad as my poems, and evoked in me the same embarrassment and shame as had the poems--for the vanity of my youthful (and in many cases not-so-youthful) ambition and its ability to cloud my mind and warp my judgement. Why, I wondered, had I even published them? Why couldn't I have made such terrible mistakes in private? It was a depressing and humbling read. Not that they were technically inept. In general, the stories were skillfully executed, stylish in the several popular modes of the 1960's and 1970's--minimalist after Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, meta-fictional after Barthelme, Barth, Gass, and Coover, sometimes braiding the two formalist tendencies in a single story, as if the tendencies were not, as their respective adherents claimed, opposed to one another.
No, what depressed and humbled me was what I saw lurking behind the surface of the story--the personality and character of the author himself, the young writer whose all-too-evident rage, pride, and insecurity were sabotaging his attempts to write stories that stood a chance of outliving him. Obviously, I knew a great deal about him already, his difficult childhood, his turbulent adolescence, his failed (as he viewed them) first and second marriages, and so on; but it was the stories themselves that gave him away. So many of them, it seemed, had been written to obscure the degree to which their author had no idea of who he was or what he was doing or whether he was any good at it. Preoccupied with the self, rather than with the world, they were the work of a young man who too often judged his characters, especially the characters who most closely resembled the author himself; and when he did not judge them, he idealized them, hovering like a custodial parent above the same character he'd just condemned, the one resembling the author. His characters were stand-ins for his shifting, unreliable opinions of himself. Thus his reliance on fashion, on the popular story-telling modes of the time.
A few of the stories, once I gave them a second look, did not embarrass me. Quite the opposite. They were the real thing, freed, it seemed to me, from the authorial vanity and literary self-consciousness. And I could see that, with a snip here, and a tuck there, if I sucked in their stomachs and adjusted the lighting a bit, they might, even to me, seem capable of successfully courting the nearest relative of the queen of the arts. These were, for the most part, stories about single mothers, blue-collar working men and women, elderly people, a retired army colonel, a gay bank clerk, and so on-characters who did not much resemble their neurotic young author. The few whose demographic profile did match the author's portrayed him only as a child or adolescent, twenty or more years earlier, beyond judgement, beyond idealization, no longer subject to his rage, pride, or insecurity. Forgiven.
Of the nearly one hundred stories previously published in book form, I selected twenty-two that I wanted to revise and keep into my old age. The rest I decided could and should be consigned to the dustbin of juvenilia, even though some of them had been written when I was in my forties. With those twenty-two revised early stories and the nine new ones now in hand--and ample, mixed bouquet displayed in my publisher's handsome yet unpretentious vase--I might knock at the muse's door and be let in. I might be almost-a-poet yet.
In June when this new book is published, I will have just turned sixty. And while re-reading, rejecting and finally revising the best of them has been a little like visiting with my past and all-but-forgotten selves, re-acquainting myself with the man I was in my twenties, thirties, forties, and so on, it has also revealed to me the man I was not. Not then, anyhow, and maybe not now or ever. Unsurprisingly, the kid in his twenties who wrote "Searching for Survivors," one of the earliest stories included, a somewhat melancholy, dreamy, self-dramatizing fellow with a lyrical impulse running through his every perception, turns out to be not significantly different than the more ironic, bemused, and plain-spoken, late-middle-aged man who at the age of fifty-nine wrote the most recent stories in the collection. I have come to see that most of the stories I left behind, like my earlier selves, were failed experiments which at the time of their composition were necessary for me to have attempted, for I would not have learned my craft if I had not written them. And while I now wish that I had not afterwards submitted them for publication, I nonetheless must admit that had I not published them, first in magazines and later in books, I doubt that I'd be able today to recognize them as failures. If I'd tossed them out while they were still in manuscript form, if I'd strangled my darlings in their beds, as Flannery O'Connor advised young writers to do, I would not have learned from them as much as I have. In cold print, in black and white, wildly dancing eyes-closed in public for all to see, those experiments, like my early poems, like my early selves, taught me what I have no talent for and, in the end, no abiding interest in.

Imprint: HarperCollins; ISBN: 0060173963

Essay Writing_The Theory

chapter one

Planning an Essay

Most writing teachers require a paper within the first class session or two. It is often a personal experience essay, something about yourself or your observations. Or maybe you will write about your first reactions to college life, the chaotic turmoil of registration, or the challenge of choosing a program of study. Some teachers will ask you to write about something you have been thinking about lately, perhaps something you have been studying in another class.

You may have to write outside of class on a topic such as a description of a room you know well, a scene you have observed, a person you have met recently, or your experience of a part-time job. Your instructor may simply tell you, “Write about anything you want to write about, but give me five pages.”

To help you do that early assignment, we elaborate on the complete writing process in this chapter. The writing process includes all the steps we take from the moment we decide we must write something until the time we finish our final draft. The writing process involves deciding on a topic, a decision we call invention. It involves gathering notes, making outlines, deciding on an introduction and a conclusion, and all the drafts that writers produce on their way to a final version. It may involve writing trial sentences or paragraphs that you may want to insert later on in your essay. The writing process involves all the thinking you do about an essay whether you are actually writing it at the moment or not.

Writing is not one act; it is many. It is not a series of steps that can be neatly set up one after another. Many parts of the writing process may go on at the same time. Writers work through successive drafts: rethinking what they are trying to say; looking for the right organization, the right words, the right arguments, the right evidence to cause their readers to take them seriously. They may begin with one idea that they want to explore; but as they write, they may discover that they really want to explore a topic that they originally thought was a side issue. As they put words on paper, their minds are continually active, rethinking their purposes and their expressions. Almost no professional writer sits down at a desk and writes a piece through exactly as it will eventually appear in print.

Experienced writers usually begin with a fairly broad topic—a historical period or a person, a problem such as water pollution or child care for working parents, a personal memory of an influential experience. A writer must decide which part of the topic is interesting enough and limited enough to be treated in an essay.

Students may be told, “Write about an experience or a person who has had great influence on your life.” A student who has come to a large, urban university from a farm may ponder the differences between rural life and city life: “I want to write about farm life.” But what exactly will she write? “Farm life” as a topic is far too broad. She must find some thesis, some unifying subject, that she can use to weave various memories and reflections together in an essay.

Professional writers go through much the same process. Someone—an editor, an agent, a friend—suggests a general topic: “Why don’t you write a piece about farming?”

“How many pages do I have?”

“Oh, do five or six double-spaced pages.”

In five or six double-spaced pages, you cannot write a complete autobiography. You cannot tell every detail about farm life. You must limit your topic to something you can cover in the assigned space. You might write about the architecture of old barns or different jobs different people do on a working farm or the different qualities of various breeds of cattle or the special concerns of the dairy farmer or the problems small farmers are having now with debt or with banks. To write well, you must have a specific subject within the broad, general topic of farming.

Professional writers have the same difficulties as inexperienced writers. Now and then they begin with a clearly defined topic. “The writer Orson Orwell is in town. I’ll interview him about his latest book, Famous Bird Dogs.” But most of the time they start with a more general idea: “I think I’ll do something on dogs,” “I’d like to write about clocks,” “It would be fun to write about various forms of chairs,” “I had an interesting life as a young person; I’d like to write about that.” Once they have that broad idea, they have to cut it down, to limit it, to give it focus.

One way of giving the idea focus is to learn more about it. Writers read up on topics. They use libraries. They consult their journals or their old letters. They talk to experts, to friends, perhaps to members of their families. In whatever way, they find information on the topic or they ponder the information they already have. They take notes. Gradually, the limitations of the essay come to them: “I want to write about farm life in Tennessee,” “I want to write about my own experience growing up on a farm in Tennessee before I came to college,” “I want to write about my father.”

As the topic grows in their minds, writers may jot down lists in a preliminary effort to organize their thoughts. They try out sentences. They may change their minds about their topics. They keep striving to find something that will fit the design of their essays. Sometimes they make outlines. They write drafts. They polish and revise. Finally they stop because they have a deadline to meet. A French writer early in this century said writers never really finish a piece of work; they only get to the place where they must abandon it.

From the time you consider writing something until you actually produce a final manuscript, you do certain things. Sometimes you can skip one thing or another; more often you must do them all. Most readers can tell when you have rushed through an assignment without spending enough time putting an essay together carefully. A brick mason must fit every brick exactly in place; otherwise the wall will look slapped together and will be so fragile that it might fall down with a push. Writing an essay is similar. Do it carelessly, and people can tell.

a              Use prewriting techniques to explore your subject before you write your first draft.

No one set of steps can make you a writer. Each of us develops his or her own process. But every process involves a step we usually call prewriting. Prewriting covers all the steps that writers take before they write a draft. Prewriting lets you limber up. You brainstorm to make ideas come, perhaps making lists of things you want to cover. You try out some sentences. You play with words and phrases, following them where they take you without worrying about order or completeness. You see where your own impulses, thoughts, and interests lead before you investigate your topic rigorously. You may write a rough outline; you may make a list of various subjects you want to cover; you may ask yourself questions.

The following suggestions for prewriting come in no absolute sequence. You can use them in any convenient order. All of them will help you develop and record ideas. They will also help you give some shape to your essay.

1                     Think about your subject.

Good writing begins with clear thinking. Although this point may seem obvious, many students start writing an essay before they have thought about it. Most of us need time to let our ideas on a topic develop and ripen. As you consider a subject—either one that your instructor requires or one that you choose for yourself—take your feelings and impulses seriously. You like some things about a subject; you dislike others. Why? Once you start thinking hard about why you have the feelings you do, you may have an idea for an essay.

Some thinking is direct. You pursue an idea and try to develop it. Other thinking is random. You may be doing something unrelated to writing—jogging or riding a bike or rushing to class—and an idea will pop into your mind. If you make yourself think about your subject before you start writing, you may nurture inspiration—the sudden, imaginative flash that may define, shape, or clarify a topic.

You should think about your audience. Who will read your essay? What do your readers already know about your topic? What can you tell your readers that they don’t know? What thoughts do you have about a subject that your readers may not have had themselves? What do you want your readers to think about you as a writer and a person?

Honesty is essential. Readers hate dishonesty, and you should want your readers to think you are an honest person. They should not imagine that you are writing something out of a desire to brag about yourself or to get at your enemies. They should not think you are trying to be cute or otherwise false. They should not think that you are showing off. Writing is a social act; your readers want to believe that you take them seriously, that you respect them, that you do not want to waste their time, that you are writing within a community of communication where both you and they belong.

Think hard about your subject, and try to keep those thoughts as honest as you can. Honesty in judgment is the first step to having a good and an original essay once you have decided on the general definition of your topic.

2                     Learn about your topic.

Good writing flows out of abundance. You must know a lot about your topic to write about it well. Good writing comes from bringing many parts of your experience to the writing task. Good writers study their subjects. They spend time in libraries. They read popular magazines as well as serious books. They talk to experts. They try out ideas on friends. They think about their subjects when they watch television or films; often they will see something that will make them understand their subject in a different way. They recall past experiences. They make comparisons. A person writing an autobiographical account about an important experience will read other autobiographical accounts to see how other writers have handled similar topics. A student writing about her failure at basketball may gather valuable insights from a roommate who has starred on the ice hockey team. The two sports are not the same, but perhaps the experiences the two women have in sports are worth comparing. Comparisons are excellent devices for learning. Someone writing about one of Charles Dickens’s novels may see Dickens more clearly by thinking of the differences between Dickens and Joan Didion.

A person from a farm in Tennessee will not be the only rural person at the university. It might be helpful for that student to go talk with others from similar backgrounds, to compare experiences. Someone from a farm in Iowa may say, “I remember how good a cold glass of water tasted after we had worked an hour in the cornfields,” and the person from Tennessee will think about drinking water in the cool shade of a cedar while getting in hay in August.

No matter how familiar you may be with a subject, you can see it better if you talk to another person also acquainted with it or with a subject akin to the one you are writing about.

It is always a good idea to talk to someone about any essay you intend to write, even if that person is not an expert on the subject. A good listener may ask you important questions or point out where you seem confused or confusing. If you can talk to an expert or to someone who has had similar experiences, that person may have information that you do not have. Your acquaintance may recommend experts you might not otherwise know. Friends who know nothing about your topic may become so interested in what you are saying that you feel encouraged to pursue it, or they may know books you have not read or recall conversations or thoughts that will help you formulate your own ideas.

Not least among the benefits of talking to someone else is the clarity you may get in your own mind from hearing yourself discuss the subject. Talking a subject out is a good way to know what you are thinking, to discover those areas where you don’t have enough information, where you must study some more. Talking is a good way to lubricate your mind. Ideas flow when you talk about them. Talking about your topic is also an excellent way to narrow it down to something manageable, something you can do in the space you have. Your teacher may divide your writing class into small groups so that you can talk to others in the group about what you are doing and listen to them tell what they are doing.

3                     Jot down ideas in an informal list.

As soon as you can, start jotting down things you may want to write about in your essay. Moving a hand across a page seems to move the brain. The more you write, the more inspiration you get. Carry your list around with you, perhaps in a small notebook. Let it grow over several days as your thoughts develop and become more specific—one or two sentences or phrases scribbled in the morning, another few dashed off as you return from class, perhaps something jotted down in class itself.

Try not to tighten up or be self-conscious. Your list is your private property. No one else will see it. Be bold. Be absurd. Free-associate. By writing freely, you may unblock ideas in your mind. Although at first chaotic, these ideas may come together later on. They are the rough ore a miner digs out of the ground; they may look like rock and dirt at first, but if you work hard with them, you will discover that they contain gold.

Country Life

living on a farm and hearing the silence at night

My father had a job as teacher in the high school in the consolidated school.

He loved farming.

He had been brought up on a farm and determined to farm, even if it did not make him any money.

We raised our food. Most of it at least.

beauty of nature

But nature is hard, too.

snakes and birds

killing pigs

the country church

Why did the preacher’s wife leave him?

the time I broke the egg in my pocket when I was four or five

the cat I shot in the foot

City people are different.

How trite can you get! Of course city people are different. But how are they different?

They live faster.

They have more organization to their lives.

the first time I ever saw a subway

baseball games between community teams: Dixie Lee Junction vs. Turkey Creek

the difference between that sort of baseball and the Mets or the Red Sox

the harshness of nature

My father’s two personalities: school principal and farmer

his names for everything

He taught us the names of birds, of trees, of plants, and of animals.

how proud he was when Peggy learned to be a good mechanic

working together

his death; the drunk driver

We moved away.

This list records many fragmentary ideas about country life by a student brought up on a farm and trying to work out a subject for the first essay he will do in his writing class. He has been told to write something about his personal experience. But he might follow the same process in any assignment he was given. As he thought about his subject, he realized that what he was thinking about most was the influence of his father on him while he was growing up. Now he made another list.

Subject: My Father’s Legacy

My father left me no money.

He left me a lot of pleasure.

his own pleasure about farming

You can have so much pleasure by enjoying the things you do every day.

He was not a daring man.

He tried the farm out, and he liked it, and that’s where he stayed.

I can’t even say he tried the farm out; that was all he ever knew.

his fascination with small things

Tell the story of how he stopped me and kept me from disturbing the woodcock. The mother woodcock on her nest. I didn’t see her. He suddenly put his hand on my arm. We were talking through that little sliver of woods that separates the pasture from the hay field, and he saw her before I did and put his hand on my arm and made me stop talking.

Tell something about the community?

the Baptist church on the hill?

My father used to be the master of the games at church socials.

He had such a good time with the young people.

But he was tough in school.

He said he didn’t want people to go away from school and remember him as just a good old man. He wanted to be tough enough on them so they wouldn’t be surprised when they went to college.

He didn’t tell everybody to go to college.

“Carpenters make a good living,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with being a good carpenter.”

But he did tell a lot of people to go to college.

He always said people from our school were just as smart as anybody; they shouldn’t stay home from college just because they thought it might be hard.

the names of things

poison sumac; poison ivy; red maples; red oaks; white oaks; white pines; loblolly pines. Larks, thrashers, all those birds. King snakes. Copperheads. Corn snakes.

What was it he called the pileated woodpecker?

Why did he go to school in Virginia?

“Don’t kill anything unless it’s dangerous to you or you’re going to eat it.”

He died in the accident, hit head-on by a drunk driver.

The driver was a senior in the high school.

He’d been to a party where people were drinking hard liquor.

He cried and cried when he found out what he had done.

This list is still not organized. But the writer has begun to define a limited topic and to see ways of limiting and defining the topic even more. Although this is to be an autobiographical piece of writing, the writer must still sort out what he knows and what he does not know about his father. He must also sort out what is interesting, what reveals character, what seems most significant in his father’s life and influence. Notice that the list contains some questions. The writer will try to answer some of those questions; others will turn out to be insignificant. Successive revisions of the list will eliminate some points, expand others, and add some that are not now on it. Writing the list prepares you for the writing of the essay itself.

Your first essay in a college writing class will often be a personal-experience essay. Since you know a lot about the subject already, you can often jot down a large number of thoughts like those above.

You can use the same process in composing an essay from texts. As you read a short story, a poem, a drama, or some other text that you must analyze in an essay, it is recommendable that you jot down ideas about it. When you are going to write about any text, it’s always a good idea to read it through quickly before you take any notes. But when you go back through and read it again, you can start writing down some thoughts about it. Jotting down such thoughts will stimulate your mind to think other thoughts.

In many college writing classes, you will read James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” Here is an example of the sort of thoughts you might jot down as you read the story.

Who are “The Dead” in this story?

Kate and Julia Morkan hold an annual dance.

They’ve been having it for years.

Now they are old. Are they “the dead”?

Gabriel is the center of the story. The narrator takes his point of view. It is a third-person story; Gabriel doesn’t tell it himself. But the narrator knows what Gabriel is thinking. The narrator is looking over his shoulder.

It’s a snowy night. The snow is mentioned early in the story, and it is the last thing mentioned in the story. What is the significance of the snow? Is the snow like time, burying people silently? Is this a story about time?

Gabriel Conroy. What is the significance of the name Gabriel? Does it refer to the Gabriel who will blow his horn when the world ends? Gabriel an angel. The Gabriel of the Bible brings people to judgment. Does this Gabriel bring people to judgment? He judges people all the way through the story. He’s unhappy. A very unhappy man at a party where people want him to be happy.

Why is Gabriel unhappy?

He’s married.

Is he unhappy about his marriage?

Is he unhappy because he lives in Ireland?

4                     Ask yourself questions about your subject.

To stimulate ideas, writers frequently ask themselves questions about a subject. We have seen some questions in the two preliminary outlines sketched above. How do you know what questions to ask? One good way of organizing questions is to think of the five w’s of journalism. Reporters are taught to ask who, what, when, where, and why. For almost any subject that you approach, you can ask several versions of each of these questions. They help you explore your subject.

To use the journalistic questions, you may write your subject at the top of the page. Then, with ample space for your answers, write down as questions who, what, when, where, and why. You may want to add the question how.

You might proceed in the following way:

Who was my father?

Who am I because of him?

Who is my mother?

Who are the people who meant most to me?

Who are the people most different from me because of the farm?

Who is my brother?

Who is my sister?

Who was the person who killed my father in the wreck?

Who were some of the most important people in my father’s life?

What did my father like about the farm?

What made him become a schoolteacher?

What did we do to win the conflict against nature?

What is nature?

What did we do on the farm?

What did he teach us?

What did he dislike about the farm?

What did my mother dislike about the farm?

When did my father and mother buy the farm?

When did I first start thinking about being different?

When did I realize that my father loved the farm more than he loved his teaching?

Why did my father go to school in Virginia?

Why did my mother fall in love with him?

Why did she consent to live on the farm?

Where was our farm?

Where did my father grow up?

Where did my father teach?

Where did he learn everything he knew about nature?

You can ask many of these questions. They operate like a searching program on a computer, running through your memories and making some of them stand out for the purposes that you are gradually selecting in your essay. As you ask as many versions of these questions as possible, you start uncovering material that will fit well with your essay. You cannot answer all the questions you raise; you will not want to answer them all because the answers to some of them will not contribute to your piece of writing. But raising a great many questions will help you scan your subject, seeing things in it that may make your writing interesting.

5                     Write nonstop for a stated time period.

Filling up a page with your writing may help overcome some of the nervousness that often grips people when they sit down to write. Make yourself sit at a table or a keyboard and spin sentences out ten minutes at a time. Do not get up in that time. Do not stop writing. Do not try to preserve any order. You can leap around all over the place in a writing exercise like this. The ideas will flow. You can gather them up later into coherent forms.

It may be painful to keep your pen or your keys on the computer or the typewriter moving. But do not stop. Do not look back to see what you have written. Do not erase or cross anything out. Do not stop to check spelling or grammar. Do not stop for anything until the time you have set for the exercise is up. Write whatever forces you to produce. You can edit later on. If you worry too much about being correct, you may block your thoughts. Remember, you alone will see this prose. You should not trouble yourself about how it looks. Try to write complete sentences. And when you look back over the sentences done in this fashion, you will find some ideas there worthy of further exploration.

The student writing about his memories of his father wrote the following thoughts in a half hour without getting up from his desk and without pausing to consider whether he was organizing things well, spelling his words correctly, or getting all the grammar right.

I was scared to death when I got to the college and saw all these people who knew things I didn’t know and who talked about things I had only seen on television and who looked at me like I was a refugee from a zoo when I said, yes, I really did grow up on a farm, although my father was a high school teacher. But he had grown up on a farm, and he never got it out of his system, I guess, and he taught school because he or we couldn’t make a living out of the farm by itself, but he loved to farm. Nobody can make a living farming on fifty acres. When you consider what schoolteachers make, I guess you’d have to say that my father was an odd one—using school teaching to make money enough to let him stay on the farm. He loved tractors, and he loved putting hay in the barn and fixing things and turning up the soil, and I loved it, too. Well, I loved most of it. I really didn’t like being up in the hot barn with the sun beating down on the galvanized iron roof and making the loft as hot as an oven and the hay down my back in my shirt and the sweat rolling off my body and making all the hay and the dust stick to me. Well, this isn't an essay about my miseries in the barn loft. I had to milk morning and night. Three cows, and to tell the truth, I never did like cows much, and especially in the wintertime I didn’t like to go down to the barn in the dark at six in the morning, and we couldn’t go places because we had to milk every day, and my father didn’t trust other people to take care of the cows. No, I hated the cows and milking and the tedium of having to be there morning and night at the same time, and cows are dangerous, too. There were lots of things wrong with growing up like that, but I didn’t think about them at the time. Well, maybe they weren't “wrong,” but I guess you would have to say they were hardships, conflicts. It’s always work. We never could go anywhere because we had to milk the cows, and we couldn’t or my father wouldn’t trust anybody to milk the cows for him, although my mother said she thought he was just making an excuse not to have to go anywhere. He didn’t like to leave the farm when he didn’t have to. I wondered if he might be afraid to go somewhere else. But we did work hard; we all worked hard. We worked together, too, and I loved that. He was always cheerful. When we did some dumb thing, he didn’t get mad at us. Like the time I forgot to set the disk harrow right and ran the tractor over the whole upper field where we were going to plant a new stand of hay, and he came out and said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “I’ve harrowed the field,” and he said, “You haven't harrowed the field; you’ve just run the tractor and the harrow over the field. If you’re going to break the clods, you have to set the harrow at an angle. Let me show you.” So he showed me, and he slapped me on the leg in a friendly way, and he said, “OK, Champ. Now you’re ready to disk-harrow the field; so I had to do it all over again. I think my father loved the farm because it gave him something to do all the time; it occupied his mind. He could see things happen because of his work. It wasn’t like working in a corporation where you decide something and pass it on up the way, and somebody else decides on your decision, and by the time something gets done, it’s so far away from you that you don’t seem responsible for it. We were responsible for everything that happened on the farm. And it kept all of us together. He had been in a close family. We were all a close family. We worked side by side in the fields, and we were a team. We knew what to expect of each other; we knew what we could do and what we couldn’t do, and I think my father liked that predictability. It was a hard life. But it was an orderly life, and we all counted for something. There was work that had to be done, and if we didn’t do the work, it wouldn’t get done, and we’d all suffer. We all had to work together to make it, and there was a lot of satisfaction in that, a lot of pleasure. He took so much pleasure in teaching us things. The names of birds, the names of plants, the names of animals, the names of snakes. “Never kill anything unless it’s dangerous or you plan to eat it,” he said. A good motto for living in nature. He wouldn’t let us kill the king snakes in the corncrib because they ate the rats that ate the corn. I’d rather have the rats myself. But we let the king snakes alone. They kept the copperheads away, too.

After rereading these sentences, the writer might see some of the things he wants to emphasize in his main essay. He might see other things that he decided were not so important. These sentences are a long way from a finished essay. But the ideas are beginning to flow. The writer is beginning to get his thoughts in order.

6                     Draw a subject tree.

You can draw a subject tree by taking a sheet of paper and making a rough drawing of a tree and then writing in possible subjects along the various branches of your tree. You don’t have to be a good artist to draw the tree. It’s just a device to tie together various related ideas.

The subject tree allows you to jot down ideas in a rough organization, seeing where the various ideas lead. As you can see, the accompanying subject tree produces a number of ideas that can be developed into an essay. Making up a subject tree will often give you confidence because it will show you that you have more to write about in relation to a general subject than you thought when you started. The subject tree breaks knowledge down into manageable chunks, and you can then put those chunks together in an essay.

7                     Browse in the library, or do research on your subject.

For many topics, reference books, other texts, and magazine articles will suggest ideas you have not thought of yourself. Several hours of browsing in the library and taking notes give many writers just the materials they need to develop a specific topic with confidence. You may also wish to interview people who know about your topic. Many interesting essays do not depend on libraries. Writing a personal-experience essay, for example, may not require you to work in the library. But other topics will always be much better if you do some general reading about them. Researching a subject always broadens your understanding and provides important details you can draw on later.

Using these prewriting techniques individually or in combination, you can record the mixed impressions you have about a subject. Once you put some ideas on paper, you can start to narrow your topic into something you can manage in an essay.

b              Limit your subject.

When you must choose your own subject, you may immediately decide what you want to write about. A friend of yours may have been injured in an automobile accident caused by a drunk driver. You may decide to write about how beer and wine are advertised on television and to try to analyze the appeals that ad writers are making to young people. Occasionally topics pop into your head, and you find that you can write well about them.

But most writers arrive at their topics by a slow, uneven process. You may want to write about religion and morals. But thousands of books have been written on that subject. You must bring it down to an essay you can manage in five or six pages. You want your essay to be interesting, to grab attention but not to be vulgar. And if you write in general about religion and morals, you will probably not interest anyone. But suppose you write about the differences among Christians, Moslems, and Jews when it comes to the drinking of alcohol? Suppose you write about the problems of separation between church and state in your country, taking an issue such as prayer in the public schools or government aid to church-supported schools or the teaching of religion in the public schools? Suppose you write about the various constitutional issues involved in the choice of textbooks for public schools? Find out what various religious groups have said on these subjects and you may have the basis for a fine essay.

You may want to write about physical exercise. But you can look at any large newsstand and see perhaps a dozen or more magazines covering various forms of exercise—bicycling, walking, jogging, weight lifting, wrestling, and so on. How do you limit your topic so you can write about some aspect of exercise that will interest your readers? If you refuse to limit your topic and stay with making general ramblings about a general subject, your work will be tedious. Don’t be satisfied with being tedious.

Sharpening your subject to make it more interesting may take much thought. You may find it easier to develop a specific topic if you take a series of steps to limit it progressively:

Too broad	Still too broad	Less broad	Still less broad
exercise	good exercises	jogging	the effects of jogging on the heart and blood pressure
	bad exercises	manic jogging	the damage excessive jogging does to the knees and feet
farm life	my sixteen years on a farm	my father’s place in my memories of farm life	the major ways my life on the farm makes me different from city friends
	nature	farmers and nature	nature as beauty and destructive force in farm life
pollution	pollution of the air	pollution of the air in the home	pollution caused by wood stoves
	pollution of the water	acid rain	the controversy between the U.S. and Canada over acid rain
computers	computers in education	computers in writing courses	how the computer changed my writing process
	computers in the home	what computers can and cannot do in the home	a comparison between the extravagant claims made for computers in magazines published in 1982 and the realities of today

Even topics in the column “Still less broad” may be narrowed further. Only you can decide how much to limit your own topics for essays. That decision depends on the physical demands of the task—minimum or maximum length, for example—and how much time you have to write. Once you do limit a topic, your ideas about it will expand. Record those ideas as they come to you, and add them to your prewriting materials.

c              Pick the approach that suits your topic best.

Long ago, teachers established four general “modes” of writing and speaking—description, narration, exposition, and argumentation. Most writing involves a combination of these modes. You rarely find a description that does not involve narration, a narration that does not have some description in it, or an exposition or argument that does not include the other two. Many essays may include all four modes. But it helps to know the different modes so you can think about what you are doing as you write and so you can decide which mode ought to predominate in your essay.

Description provides some sort of visual image of a scene, an object, or a person:

Our house stood on a hillside in a grove of maples and oaks.

Narration tells a story, usually in chronological sequence:

I heard the shriek of brakes, the crash, and then the scream. Nick had tried to straighten his tie in the rearview mirror, lost control of his car, and crashed through the window of the bank. He was on his way to the bank to make his last car payment. He stepped out of the wreck unharmed and said to the loan officer, against whose desk the car had come to rest, “Do we have insurance for this?”

Exposition explains.

The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guaranteeing the right of citizens to keep and bear arms does not mean that just anybody can walk around town with a loaded machine gun.

Argument usually maintains a point of view against other, opposite points of view.

Although some of them are very funny, beer commercials should be outlawed from television.

Much college writing is predominantly expository because college essays usually explain texts, statistics, observations, or whatever. The line between an expository essay and an argumentative essay may be thin. You may explain your interpretation of a short story, for example, to prove that someone else’s interpretation is incorrect. Then your exposition drifts over into argument.

Think about the four modes as you plan your writing, for they can help you clarify the purpose of your essay. The chart below shows how a writer might develop the same general subject along four distinct lines once a specific purpose is established.

general subject: growing up on a tennessee farm

Mode	Purpose
Description	To present a picture of the community in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains
Narration	To describe how my family happened to live there and to tell some of the stories that illustrate what sort of man my father was and how he influenced my life
Exposition	To explain some of the attitudes my father had and what effect they had on his life
Argument	To persuade readers that living on the farm with my family was valuable, even in a world where farming is a declining way of life

These topics will help the writer of the essay better understand why he or she is writing the essay and what ought to go into it. You can use them in this way for almost any essay you write once you have narrowed the topic down to something you can handle in an interesting way. You can see how easy it is to move from one mode to another. You can also see that the final purpose of your essay will lead you to emphasize one of these modes above all the others. If your purpose is to present a convincing argument, you may want to keep description and narration to a minimum. If you want to write a straight news story about an accident, you may not want to make any arguments at all: you will tell what happened; you will write a narrative. If you are explaining the various steps doctors take in treating an accident victim, you may find that telling the story of an actual accident is a distraction.

Always keep your major purpose clearly in mind. Once your purpose is clear, it will be easy to choose the rhetorical mode that best suits your aims in writing the essay and emphasize that mode in your writing. The writer of the essay who wants to recall his father and farm life decided, in looking at the different modes, that he did not want to make a strong argument about his father or farm life. There was little to argue about. No one was likely to dispute his account of farm life or his memories of his late father. The topic lent itself much more to narration, to telling illustrative stories about his family’s experiences on a small Tennessee farm. Readers could then take their own lessons from his story—as we do from most narratives.

chapter two

Developing an Essay

As you get further into developing an essay, you will do several things to shape it and to give it a clear focus. There is no special order to this process, but here are parts of it that you must consider. You are still using prewriting techniques at this stage of your work.

a              Consider your intended audience.

Who will read your writing? Avoid thinking of your audience only as the teacher who will evaluate your essay. Write to appeal to others—your friends, the other members of the class, or other people you know. Try to write to engage the attention of people you respect. Always remember that your readers could be doing other things. Try to interest them. Try to be so clear that they have no trouble understanding you. Try to make them willing to stop doing something else so they can have the pleasure of reading what you write.

In many respects, you create your audience as you write. If you write sensibly, interestingly, clearly, and with occasional flashes of wit, you will draw the sort of audience that does most of the reading. If you write with passionate emotion and uncompromising anger towards everyone who disagrees with you, your audience will be a small group of fanatical true believers whose emotions rule their way of looking at the world. These people read only material they either love or hate. They do not read to be persuaded of a point of view because they have made up their minds already. If you write in a dull, plodding effort to fill pages and not to take any risks, you will get a dull, plodding audience of a few people who will read your prose because they have nothing better to do at the moment. Or you will get an audience of one: your teacher, who is paid to read your writing no matter how dull it is. You will probably never find a more patient audience than the teacher. Always remember that in life beyond school, you have to write for people who do not have to read your work and who will put it down quickly when it bores them.

1                     You should always think of writing within a community of discourse.

A community of discourse is a group with certain interests, knowledge, and expectations and with certain conventional ways of communicating with each other. We usually belong to several communities of discourse. Baseball fans make up a community of discourse; they talk and write about the game in familiar ways, and they understand each other even though people outside the community may not know what they are talking about. Every baseball fan would understand this sentence:

Mickey Mantle switch-hit for the Yankees for eighteen seasons, compiling a .298 lifetime batting average and an astonishing slugging average of .557.

For someone outside the baseball fan’s community of discourse, such a statement is gibberish. But consider this statement from the community of discourse that includes biologists:

Endocytosis of liposomes occurs in a limited class of cells: those that are phagocytic, or able to ingest foreign particles. When phagocytic cells take up liposomes, the cells move the spheres into subcellular organelles known as lysosomes, where the liposomal membranes are thought to be degraded.

Marc J. Ostro

To a biologist, these sentences convey clear thoughts; to people outside the community of discourse made up of biologists, they are gibberish—just like the baseball fan’s language to the nonfan. Historians, specialists in literature, economists, philosophers, astronomers, model-railroad enthusiasts, pilots, engineers, salespeople, stockbrokers, dentists, surgeons, and thousands of other groups have their own communities of discourse within which certain expectations control the way members communicate with each other. Writers within these disciplines must know what will interest others, what is new, what is old, how members of the community think, and what language they use to appeal to one another.

You don’t have to define switch-hitter to a baseball fan. You don’t have to define liposomes to a biologist. But you would have to define both these terms to readers outside these two communities of discourse.

You determine your audience in part by how much you think you have to explain. Are you writing for people who already know a lot about your subject? Or are you writing for those who might be interested only if you can relate your subject to something in their own experience, which does not happen to include much knowledge about your subject? As we have seen, certain words require no explanation within a given community of discourse because everyone understands them. Once a writer broadens his or her purpose to include people outside a relatively narrow community of discourse, more explanation becomes necessary.

In a college writing class, you will usually assume that your audience includes the other members of the class. What do they know about your subject? What do you have to tell them if they are to make sense of what you are saying? If everybody in the class has read King Lear, you don’t have to summarize the plot; if nobody has read it, a short summary will be in order.

The expectations of any community of discourse involve style or tone. For any community, you should write as though you respect the reader and respect the subject that presumably interests you both. A professional historian does not write, “Gee whiz, Bismarck was one smart dude, but the bottom line was that he was bad news for Europe.” Serious historians don’t write that way. Other historians, reading such a sentence, would immediately decide not to take the writer seriously. Unfair? Perhaps. But that is the way communities of discourse work. Readers familiar with conventional ways of approaching knowledge rebel at reading a style radically different from the conventional style of that community of discourse. Yes, language does change, and communities of discourse change their expectations. But the process is slow, and you cannot speed it up by writing in an overheated style, full of slang and street-wise language.

A serious historian will write, “Bismarck’s greatness as a German statesman is undisputed, but it was not a moral greatness, and his policies eventually helped bring on the slaughter of World War I.” The tone indicates a serious interest in a serious historical question. It also represents respect for the expectations of historians when they read about history. They will take this historian seriously because they see a serious style.

2                     Keep the same tone in writing to both experts and others.

Over years of experience, writers come to feel most comfortable with one tone. Whether you address scholars or high school students, do not use slang words that seem to condescend or jargon that seems to say much more than it really does. Scholars will not have to be told that the action in King Lear supposedly takes place before Britain became Christian; high school students will probably have to be given that information. They may not know that people lived in Britain before Christianity arrived. But to neither would you write, “When you get right down to it, everybody in the play was hyper, and old Lear was the most hyper guy in the whole bunch. Cordelia was a real sweetie, but she didn’t have too many smarts if you ask me.”

To neither audience would you write, “The highly idiopathic and narcissistic ego-gratification impulse in Lear, while problematic, transpires in an empirical evolution manifestly evident to the discriminating audience as sanguinary self-destruction.”

In writing the personal-experience essay you may be assigned at the beginning of a composition course, you have a little more freedom. Autobiography is often more relaxed than history, philosophy, science, and other academic disciplines. But often in autobiography, you must explain more than you might explain in a history essay. You have to tell your readers enough about your personal experience to let them understand it. You have to give them enough details to enable them to understand why you feel as you do about various matters. They have to know enough to understand why some things in the experience happened as they did. They have to know why you care enough to tell the story.

3                     Ask yourself what you expect the audience to know.

Whoever your readers may be, give them enough knowledge to read your work comfortably. Do not try to alter your style so that you use big, complicated words with one group and breezy or slangy words with another. As you work through your writing life, writing as much as you can, you will develop the style that suits you. Stick with it.

In much of the writing you will do after college, you will be trying to appeal to many different audiences. At work, your audience may include your boss, those you supervise, the owners of the business, potential consumers, and the government agency that regulates what you do. For different groups of readers, the same subject demands different approaches. You must explain things to some groups that you do not have to explain to others. You may, with intimate associates, say some things and use some words that you would not use with readers you know less well. But in whatever you write, your best approach is always to use a flexible style that conveys seriousness without rigidity, fairness without groveling, and friendliness without embarrassing informality that could be considered condescension.

4                     In thinking about your audience, keep the journalistic questions in mind.

Whenever you introduce a new character or a new piece of information, ask yourself if your readers know who the character is, what is happening, why it is happening, where it is happening, and when it is happening. Journalists try to answer these questions in the first couple of sentences of a story.

A fire in a rooming house at 221 Broadway left fourteen people homeless early this morning. The blaze, apparently starting in a Christmas tree, engulfed the frame building in a matter of moments. No one was killed, but several tenants were hospitalized for injuries caused when they jumped to safety from their windows.

Such a story tells what happened, where it happened, who was involved, why it happened, and when it happened. It makes a good beginning for a news story, although you will not usually use such a beginning in college essays. Still, the questions need to be answered whenever you introduce new information in a piece of writing. When you bring in a new character, always give the full name and accompany it with some sort of identifying tag. “Burriss Young, the dean in charge of the fellowship competition, organized the interviews.” When you say that something happened, tell where and when it happened; and if you can tell why it happened, so much the better.

b              Choose the evidence and details you need to make your points.

When you make assertions, provide some evidence to back them up. You may have strong opinions, but few readers accept opinions merely because a writer believes them passionately. You must present evidence that others can accept. If your teacher writes “Be specific” in the margin of an essay, she is probably asking you for some details that support some assertion you have made.

If you say, “Faulkner sometimes seems to get lost in his prose and to lose readers, too,” quote a text from Faulkner as evidence for your assertion. You may say, “Dickens lamented the plight of the poor in nineteenth-century England, but he seemed to have no solution except the hope that some good rich people would be generous.” If you make such an assertion, give some examples from Dickens’s novels to support it. If you say, “James Baldwin puzzled over the Swiss villagers who had never seen a black as much as they puzzled over him,” back your statement up with something from Baldwin’s essay “A Stranger in the Village.”

1                     Consider different kinds of evidence and details.

An essay filled with assertions and lacking details that constitute evidence is nearly always a bad piece of writing. Evidence varies. You may use one kind of evidence for one essay, another kind for a different essay.

source of evidence	kind of evidence
Personal experience and observation	Concrete sensory details. Describe specific actions, colors, sights, sounds, smells, and tastes to re-create an experience for a reader.
	Dialogues and indirect quotations. Reproduce the words people say so you can enliven a scene.
	Tell stories of events you have witnessed that make you believe something.
Authorities: books, periodicals, TV, radio, films, interviews	Quotations, paraphrases, summaries. Support your points by quoting the words of authorities or by restating their ideas in your own words.
Statistics and cases	Use data (often from charts, graphs, and tables) to lend force to your assertions.
Inferences	Draw conclusions that seem to come from the evidence, though they may not be explicit in the evidence itself.

If you write about a trial you have observed in your local courthouse, you may want to capture the drama by using the details arising from language of the senses, recording the appearance of the courtroom, the actions of the various participants, the smells of the surroundings, and the various sounds that will evoke the scene for your readers. You might write about the bored expression of the judge, the no-smoking signs hanging over the bench where he sits smoking a cigarette, the professional courtesy of the opposing lawyers, the appearance of the defendant, the nervousness of witnesses, your own difficulties in deciding who is telling the truth, your conversations with other spectators.

You might choose to take a historical approach, reading the transcript of a famous trial and studying books and articles written about it afterwards. You might quote from the evidence given at the trial and quote from the books and articles written afterwards to prove that the evidence was true or false, good or bad.

For yet another kind of essay, you might study the statistics for convictions and sentencing for various kinds of crimes among different age, gender, and ethnic groups. Who is most likely to be sentenced to death in your country? What groups experience the greatest rates of crime? The questions are endless, and the evidence is readily available in various government documents your reference librarian can help you find.

2                     Use inferences carefully and wisely.

In both your observations and your use of data, you will have the chance to infer things. When we infer, we try to make sense of our observations by reasoning about them on the basis of experience or what we often call common sense. We awake in the morning and see snow on the ground; when we went to bed last night, the sky was clear and there was no snow anywhere in sight. So on seeing the snow, we infer that it fell during the night even though we did not see it happen. Inference is the way the mind operates to tell us what happened even when we did not see it happening.

The defendant was found with a gun in his pocket. Two of the bullets had been fired. Ballistics tests show that the bullets that killed the victim exactly match the bullets fired from this revolver. The victim had quarreled violently with the defendant. But the defendant says that he found the gun in the gutter, already fired, outside the victim’s house and was planning to take it to the police when he was arrested. What do you infer? Such questions are the stuff of thrillers in the movies, but they are also a part of real life, where we infer things every day.

3                     Fit different kinds of evidence and details together.

These various kinds of details to form evidence do not exclude one another. An essay rooted in statistical or quoted evidence also benefits from the concrete sensory details that engage readers. A newspaper story once told readers that government debt in the United States was approaching a trillion dollars. It illustrated a trillion dollars by saying that that was enough money to give every ant in the United States a dollar bill. Or that if you put a trillion dollar bills end to end, they would reach the star Alpha Centauri, which is over four light years from earth. By converting numbers into something we can visualize, at least to a certain degree, we make the numbers more vivid.

It is impossible to say exactly when in the writing process your attention should turn to evidence and details. Some writers begin to consider it only after they write a thesis statement or as they write a rough draft. Others think about details earlier, as they formulate and refine the evidence they need to support their topic.

When you consider your chosen topic and the audience you have in mind, think about the kinds of evidence that will best suit your purpose. Ask yourself how you will gather the details to create the evidence you need. For most essays, you will find questions like these helpful:

1.       What experiences in my own life will help me make this topic interesting?

2.       What have I read recently in books, newspapers, or magazines—or what can I read before I write—that will help me support my topic?

3.       What have I heard on the radio or observed on television or in the movies that will help me support my topic?

4.       What have I learned in recent conversations with friends, parents, relatives, teachers, and associates that will help me support my topic?

5.       What do people in my audience know about my topic? What will interest them? What will bore them? What may even surprise them?

c              Think through the main idea of your composition, and write a thesis statement.

Define your main idea, or thesis—the essential thing you want to say about your subject—before you plan and write your essay. As you write and revise, you may change your mind about your thesis. Writers often start an essay and discover that their original thesis is not exactly what they want to say. Then they formulate a new thesis. That is all part of the writing process, and you should accept the proddings of your own mind to change your thesis when those proddings become insistent.

But you will save yourself much time, and you will write much more to the point, if you formulate a main idea before you begin your first draft. You may change it slightly or transform it into something altogether different later on. But you may very well keep the same main idea from first to last draft. Having a thesis focuses the mind and helps you control the sentences and paragraphs that make up your composition. It is usually helpful to formulate your thesis as an argument: What is the most important thing I want my readers to think about my subject? Do I want them to do something? If so, what do I want them to do?

Once you have narrowed the focus of your topic, construct a thesis statement. A thesis statement may be one sentence. Or it may be a couple of sentences or even a short paragraph that tells your readers what they are going to be reading, what tone you are going to use in your piece. It also tells readers why they should read what you have written. It lets them know what to expect and lets them decide whether they want to go on with your work. It usually describes your position on the subject as well. What do you think about the subject? If you are writing about organic gardening, for example, your readers should know right away whether you believe in organic gardening or whether you will argue that it is a waste of time and money. Your thesis statement may also include the two or three major arguments you intend to use to support your proposition. The following limited topics at the left led writers to produce the thesis statements at the right.

limited topic	possible thesis statement
surprise endings in fiction	The good surprise ending, as in William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily,” makes us feel that we should have expected it, for in subtle ways the writer prepares us for it throughout the story.
the effects of jogging on the body	Despite its many advantages, jogging can cause serious injuries to the feet, the knees, and the back.

In the first example, the thesis states the topic—surprise endings. Her thesis claims that a surprise ending is good if it makes us think we should have expected it all along. We expect the essay to prove that thesis with evidence drawn from Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.” In the second example, we have a list of bodily parts that jogging can injure. We expect the essay to discuss the effects of jogging on the feet, the knees, and the back, bringing in medical evidence that the writer has found in various publications.

limited topic	possible thesis statement
passenger trains in the United States	Passenger trains can do great service in American transportation if Americans will only realize that transportation is too important to be supported only by people who travel.
local courtroom drama	The murder trial I witnessed this summer made me reflect on how extraordinary and painful events are quickly brought under control in our society by being wrapped up in routine procedures (like those in a courtroom) that make the extraordinary ordinary.
school architecture at home in my high school	The architects of our high school at home thought they would save on fuel by having many classrooms without windows, but the result was disaster.
photographs in the library collection	The old photographs in our library not only show the clothing styles of past times but also how families thought of themselves as units grouped around the oldest male.
advertising in two popular journals	The advertising in Rolling Stone and The New York Times helps show us many things about the differences in the audiences for the two publications.
a comparison between Hemingway and Faulkner	Hemingway and Faulkner both wrote about men proving themselves in conflicts with large and dangerous animals—Hemingway’s characters with bulls and Faulkner’s with bears. But at heart Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s characters were after self-knowledge.
my growing up on a fairly isolated farm	I spent the first sixteen years of my life on a farm in Tennessee, and my father gave me some of my most vivid memories.
my battle to control my heavy drinking	The morning when I woke up in the seat of my car in a barnyard, not knowing how I got there, my head pounding with the worst hangover in my life, was the moment I realized I had to stop drinking so much alcohol.

d              To develop your essay, expand your informal written ideas, group them by subject, and organize them in a rough outline.

As you write your thesis statement, you will probably think of more ideas related to your topic and ways to expand ideas you have already recorded. Do not hesitate to add these new ideas to your prewriting papers. It is important to include as many points as you can to help you write. You may start with one thesis statement and, as you begin to write a draft, discover that your thesis—what you really want to write about—is changing. Next, examine all your prewriting materials and put together related thoughts. You can do this in many ways: cutting and pasting, drawing lines and arrows from one point to a related one, or identifying ideas that belong together with a letter or a symbol in the margin. Some writers look at their lists or jottings produced in prewriting and recopy them into groups of connected thoughts.

As you read your materials, look for some principle to guide you in clustering ideas. For instance, which points on one page depend on points you have made on other pages? If you tie together related ideas before you write, you can improve your chances for producing a clear and logical essay.

1                     Choose a method for arranging your information.

As you group your ideas, think about ways of organizing them. Without a doubt there are many possible ways of arranging the thoughts you have grouped together. However, at this stage, most writers find it helpful to consider the following common methods for arranging information in an essay:

Chronological

A chronological arrangement relates events as they happen in time. Narratives are usually chronological. The writer of the essay about local courtroom drama, for example, will probably begin with the opening of the trial and will continue, event by event, to the end.

Spatial

You can choose a logical starting point and then move through space systematically. If you are told to describe a painting in a local art gallery or in an art book, for example, you might look at the central focus of the painting and then move outward to the edges of the canvas. If you were asked to describe a landscape, you might write about its most dominant impression and then move, a step at a time, to the less noticeable features that contribute to the whole.

General to Specific, or Specific to General

You may see a relation between a general point and some specific points that would support it. To group these related points together, you can move from a general statement to specific details, or you can arrange your points the other way around. The writer about surprise endings in fiction could begin with the general statement that surprise endings involve careful preparation. She would then support that general statement with specific information from Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”

The essay about the high school with the windowless rooms could begin with a series of specific statements about incidents in those rooms—children sweating from being overheated in the wintertime, feeling gloomy at being cut off from the sun, the grade curve being lower in those rooms than in rooms with windows, teachers assigned to those rooms quitting their jobs at a much higher rate than others. Then there could come the general statement that the reason all these incidents took place was the gloominess of windowless rooms designed by an architect for heating efficiency rather than for learning. We often see popular magazine articles begin with anecdotes. Having presented the anecdote to whet our interest, the writer tells us why the anecdote means something in a larger context. This sort of introduction moves us from the specific to the general.

By Importance

Some points will seem less important than others in supporting an idea. You may make an argument in the opening paragraph of your essay, then support it by points that climb from the less important to the more important. If your last points have great emotional appeal, you might say that your argument builds in a crescendo-a gradual increase of intensity that reaches a peak of such force that readers must pay attention to it and take it seriously. The student writing about the need for passenger trains could build to a crescendo by arguing first that passenger trains are a graceful and convenient way to travel, then that all major countries subsidize their railroads, then that railroads offer a way to keep from choking cities with automobile fumes, and finally that a good passenger railroad system provides a sense of community for people who cannot afford air transport and yet want to travel comfortably and with dignity.

The writer has to decide which ideas are more or less important than others, and different writers may make different choices—just as different writers make different arguments.

These principles of organization should be especially useful to you during this early planning stage, though you may alter or abandon the sequence you have planned once you start to write.

2                     Create a rough outline.

When you put your ideas in sequence, you create a rough outline to expand and develop. Rough outlines are informal, private conveniences for the writer, and they follow no prescribed format. From prewriting material, one writer prepared this rough outline for a composition:

Tentative thesis statement: My father’s love for his family farm in Tennessee made him a special kind of person and created the legacy that he gave to his children.

Introduction: Tell what home was in my childhood—a farm in Tennessee and my father’s place on the farm and our family life together until he was killed in a car accident.

1.                   First steps

Earliest memories: Who was in our family; who my father was; who my mother was; why they married; what we did; what sort of life we had; where we lived; where we did things; why we lived there; when these things happened.

2.                   What characterized farm life: The routines of farm life; the things my father used to love to do. His love of nature, of planting things, of looking at things on the farm, of knowing the names of things, of seeing it all as a great experience. Why did he like the farm so much? It was familiar. It was a relief from his job as a school principal. Did he like being a school principal? I never knew.

3.                   What we did in the community—church, parties, funerals, telling stories, knowing each other. The community where everybody knew everybody else. Different from the city where you don’t know your neighbor next door. Our life in the church. Church every Sunday. Long, boring sermons. But it was a great thing to talk after church, especially in warm weather, when people took their time exchanging news—gossip, I guess—before they went home to Sunday dinner.

4.                   The advantages of farm life over city life—healthier, safer, more secure.

5.                   The disadvantages—isolation, not knowing many things that city children know, no travel, no real vacations.

6.                   Why everything changed. My father was killed in a car wreck. We had to leave the farm.

7.                   Conclusion: How things are now with the farm and with me.

You can also write up a fully developed formal outline if you want. But a rough outline will usually suffice. As you develop the first draft of your essay, you may change your rough outline to include some new ideas. But even if you do not follow your original outline exactly, it can provide a first check on unity and coherence. An essay has unity if all the ideas support the thesis. An essay has coherence when each thought in the essay flows logically into the next, allowing readers to follow the connections from one point to the next.

Sometimes unity and coherence flow quickly into your writing without much effort. An idea comes to mind in a flash and you write it down clearly, it leads logically to another idea, and somehow every sentence seems to flow easily into the next. But most of the time we all have to work hard to achieve unity and coherence in our writing. Unity and coherence usually develop as you write successive drafts of your essay. Writing a rough outline can help save time by helping you see the points you want to make, evaluate them, rearrange them, perhaps eliminate some of them, and perhaps add some more before you start to work.

3                     Check your rough outline.

Checking his rough outline, for example, this writer saw that he should tell his story within a broad chronological framework. He planned now to begin with his earliest childhood on the farm and then come forward to the time when he left the farm and moved to the city. But he realizes that within that broad framework, he does not have to be strictly chronological. His father is dead; he wants to remember him and to tell other people what kind of man he was and to imply, at least, some of the influence that his father had on him. To perform this task he can tell several stories about his father without having to say, “This happened when I was six, and this happened when I was ten, and this happened when I was fourteen, and this happened when I was sixteen.” He can be selective in the order that he tells various stories while still following a general chronological sequence. So the dominant modes in his essay will be narration and description, and the general design of the essay will be of several shorter stories put together to make a larger story. Good narratives often have such a design so that the shorter incidents or stories become like the separate beads strung on a thread that make up a necklace; only instead of a necklace, the separate stories make a broader narrative.

This writer sees some difficulties in his outline. When he wrote it, he was still toying with the idea of defending farm life and of arguing that it is better than city life. Then he could argue that despite appearances, his father had given him the best possible life. That’s when he put in part 4. But now as he looks at the outline, he begins to wonder if that argument is necessary. He added part 5 to show that farm life also has many disadvantages, and he decides that his essay may lose coherence if he tries to argue that one is better than the other. Maybe it is sufficient to tell his story without any argument at all. He will think about this issue as he writes.

With all the prewriting that he has done, he now has a lot of material for his essay. But he must now ask himself if he can reasonably expect to get all this information into one essay. That is a serious question for a writer to ponder. Perhaps the only way to answer it is to produce a rough draft. The mind generally works better when you are writing a draft than when you are writing a rough outline.

Even so, you should always jot down a rough outline before you start writing a draft. It will help you see the shape and direction of your essay and will help you decide what you have to say and how you will go about saying it. It will raise helpful questions about limitations. Can you say everything you want to say in the space you have available? If not, how do you say those things most interesting to you and most likely to be interesting to your readers?

If you develop a rough outline, you may save yourself a lot of time later on. Sometimes you may do several drafts of such an outline—just as you will do several drafts of an essay. Each draft allows you to think more about your subject before you commit yourself to writing. This preliminary organization may not do everything you hope it will do. You will almost certainly change some things once you start writing. But a strong organizational effort at the beginning will save you much time in the writing process and give you confidence that you do have something worthwhile to say.

This student must also consider his audience. Why would anyone want to read about his father? Why would anyone want to read about farm life in Tennessee? Why would anyone care what happened to the family after his father died?

The writer recognizes, perhaps unconsciously, some advantages he enjoys with his essay. We love stories. When we hear stories about people, we identify with them and want to know how the story comes out because in some sense we are living through it with the characters. The main character in an autobiographical piece should usually be someone readers would like to know. Sometimes we get interested in characters who are so bad that we view them with horrified fascination. But most of the time we want to like the main characters in an autobiographical piece.

We also want some tension in the stories we read, whether they are fact or fiction, personal experience or novel. Something must happen. There must be some movement to the story. There should be some conflict, either between characters or between a character and some trial or challenge presented early in the narrative. When we read novels or short stories, or when we see plays or movies, we like to see something happening, a problem set at the beginning, characters moving through incidents related to solving the problem, finally solving it or being overwhelmed by it. When you write a personal-experience piece, you should find an incident that has some conflict, some tension, some problem in it; and you should let your audience know of that tension right away. Then the essay should move toward some resolution, some sense of conclusion or finality in which the problem or the conflict is resolved.

chapter three

Writing and Revising an Essay

This chapter will take you through a sample writing process that will involve producing drafts of an essay. Follow it carefully to see how the writer can help you understand what you are doing in drafting your own composition.

a              Prepare the first draft of your composition.

With the results of your prewriting and your rough (or formal) outline close at hand, you can start writing. Don’t try to make it perfect. This is a first draft and therefore a rough draft! The ideas that pop into your head during your prewriting and while you build an outline will only begin to take shape as you develop statements and fill in details on your first draft.

Don’t worry too much about errors of fact, questionable spellings, or awkward constructions. Write your first draft as fast as you can. At this stage, you should concentrate on producing a flow of ideas. When you have a draft in front of you, you can change it, correct the misspellings, smooth out the rough places, and shape the whole into a pleasing design.

Mark the places where you think you may have problems. Later you can go back and work on them. Leave wide margins. You need room for additions and corrections. Some writers triple-space after each typewritten line or skip a line or two after each handwritten one so they can insert a later improvement easily.

Don’t worry about a title now. If you can think of one, that’s just about fine. If not, develop your title later. Here is the first draft of the essay by a student named Tim about his early life on a farm in Tennessee. For this assignment early in the term, the instructor asked students to write on this topic: “What experience more than any other has shaped you as a person?” The comments in the margin were made by peer reviewers in the class:

My Father’s Farm

            Our farm was about thirty miles from Knoxville in a county called Bourbon                  Do you need to

                                                                                                                                                tell us all this in

that is very beautiful. Or at least it was beautiful when I was growing up there in the 1960s,     your first paragraph?

        

although now it has changed a lot, and it is not so beautiful any more. Anyway, I was born

there and grew up there until I was a sophmore in high school and my father got killed                       spelling?

in a car wreck, and we had to move.

            I want to write about my father, I want you to know him as I knew him.         Is this a run-on sentence?

He was born on the farm, and he never did want to leave it, although he went to

college and majored in education and became a school teacher. My father’s Uncle

Edward hated the farm and went off to school and never returned. “Bob was                  Maybe you really want to

                                                                                                                      write about your father

crazy about the place,” Uncle Edward said. “I never could see it myself.” I wondered       in this piece.

if my father just didn’t have enough confidence to leave the farm. Uncle Edward

became a lawyer. Very successful. My father never was successful. Maybe he wouldn’t

take a risk.

            But he was good to us. He didn’t want much out of life. And yet he

wanted everything out of life--satisfaction, love, some object for his work.

            You can’t make a living by farming alone, and my father wanted to do

something to keep the cash flow going, as they say, but to let him live where he

wanted to live. And that was the farm. He got a job teaching, but pretty soon he

got to be the principal of the high school. Anyway, he went off to college in                   You sound too informal

                                                                                                                    through here. I think

Virginia. Because that’s where his father wanted him to go, since his father had            you can compress.

a big thing about Virginia, thinking all the people there were aristocrats or

something, but he never was happy any place else but the farm, and he majored

in education because he had his heart set on coming back and he didn’t know

what he could do except teach.

            My mother didn’t feel so hot about living on the farm. I don’t think           Don’t you think this

                                                                                                                 is too informal?

she ever got used to it. She was from Richmond, and they met in college, and I

guess they loved each other because they got married and she came back to

live on the farm with him after college.

            I was the oldest, and I had a brother and a sister younger than me.

We all learned to do all the farm work. My sister learned to drive the tractor              I like this part.

when she was six years old, and by the time she was eight, she could drive

while we put up hay. We had two tractors. With the big one my father would

pull the baler through the field, dropping off the bound up bales.

Me and my brother picked the hay bales up after my father                                    Subject? My brother and I?

run the baler through the field, and we put them on the wagon that was           Did you leave out a helping verb?

pulled behind the tractor, and my sister drove, and people thought it was

wonderful to see an eight-year-old girl driving that tractor like she’d been doing

it all her life. Well, she had been doing it a big part of her life.

            Our community was very close, everybody knew everybody else. People       These are interesting details,

                                                                                                               but do they go with the essay?

were helpful, and when you were in trouble, you could depend on a lot of help.          Are you writing about the farm

                                                                                                               or the community?

When I was very small, too young to drive the tractor, my father got sick. I don’t

know what kind of sickness it was, but he was in bed for a long time. But some

of the nieghbors came and did our plowing for us, and they didn’t charge anything.                      Spelling?

It was just the way you did in my nieghborhood.                                                                Spelling?

            My father always wore a suit to his job at the high school. When he                   Two sentences or one?

put on his suit in the morning. He became like a different person. I think he hated

his suit. He always said wool scrached his skin. He wore cotton on the place.                    Check spelling here.

Blue jeans. Long cotton underwear in winter time. But he wore a suit to school.                Aren't these sentence

                                                                                                                        fragments? Do you

He stood up straight and got quiet when he put on his suit and seemed to think                want to use them for

                                                                                                                        emphasis?

about everything he was going to say before he said anything. We rode to school

with him. I mean my brother, my sister and me. He didn’t have much to say

to us then. You know how it is; he had to think about everything he had to do

during the day, all the teachers he had to supervise and all those students, and

he didn’t want to talk. He was always so talkative, but you know how it is when

you’ve got a big job a head of you, you’ve got to think about it, and I don’t think                       Spelling?

my father ever much liked being a school principal. People liked him, but he

didn’t like bossing people. He never said, but that’s just my opinion. We called

his school work “suit work.” We thought it was funny.

            We came home on the school bus because he always worked late. There

were always papers to fill out and letters to write and reports. School principals

make a lot of reports, but who reads them? My father wrote reports and got

everything in on time, and then at five o’clock or so he came home. As soon as

he came home, he changed his clothes, he put on blue jeans or kakis and an old                     Spelling?

flanell shirt, and he was out to the garden or to the barn or somewhere. And                         Spelling?

he got to work.

            And everything about him changed then he was like another person.

                                                                                                                   I really like this. But could

He was relaxed and calm and happy, and he’d talk to us about the different               you pull it together?

kinds of trees on the place and the different kinds of cows and chickens and all

that. They’re even different kinds of grass. That’s something you don’t suspect

about a farm. It seems so simple. But really it’s very complicated. You have to

know a lot of names, my father knew them all. He knew the loblolly pine and          There’s a comma splice in

                                                                                                                 this sentence.

the Virginia pine and the white pine. He knew the red maple and the silver

maple and the mountain maple. He knew poison ivy and poison oak and taught        I like the names of things.

us how to know them and avoid them and how to tell the difference between

the poison sumac that grew in a marshy place along the creek in the lower field

and the smooth sumac that grew in the woods.

            He loved wild flowers. Things that looked like weeds to me to him

were beautiful, and he could hold a dandelion in his hand and marvel over it

like it was a star that had fallen down to earth. Sometimes we walked back

up in the mountains, and he’d carry a little notebook in his shirt pocket, and

he’d write down the names of all the flowers he saw. It was like a contest

with him. To see how many flowers he could see in a day. When the honeysuckle

was blooming, he’d pull off some of the little blossoms and show us how to

suck the nectar out of them.

            And the birds. He loved to look at the birds. Once we were walking

through a field, and he stopped me all of a sudden by just laying a hand on my                     Don’t cut this.

arm, and he pointed, and I couldn’t see anything, but then real slow I saw

a bird the color of leaves sitting on a nest. “It’s a woodcock,” he said real quiet.

And he made me walk around so we wouldn’t disturb her.

            It was fun working with him. He loved to be out in the open and to

have us with him, and when we got through doing something—getting in                  Maybe you could compress

                                                                                                                 this part.

the hay, for example—he’d talk about how much fun it was to work together.

It was fun. Hard work but fun. He loved to plant things and to watch them

grow up. And he loved to harvest things. He said we were his finest crop, and

he couldn’t wait to see what we’d turn out to be.

            We didn’t think we were specially happy or unhappy. We just lived

from day to day, and some days we were happy, and some days we were so tired

that we thought we were unhappy. But I guess in the end you’d have to say we

were definitely happy.

            But then in my sophmore year in the high school my father was killed                      Spelling?

in a car wreck. A drunk driver hit him one night when he was coming home

after a school board meeting. My father had a bag of corn seed on the back seat

of the car when he was killed. I guess his last thoughts were about planting

something.

            My mother thought that we should move back to Richmond. She had

family there, she had lived on the farm only because my father wanted to live there.             Comma splice?

We sold the place for a pretty penny. Knoxville was spreading out. Lots of people

were commuting. A lot of people were selling off land for divisions. And so we did,

too. My mother got a good job in Richmond. So everything turned out all right.

            This last summer I went back. My father has a brother in Knoxville

who works for TVA, and I went to spend a couple of weeks with him, and he

drove me back down to the old homeplace. Everything was changed. Our house

had been bulldozed away. Streets had been laid out. There were a lot of houses

built and others going up. We had a driveway running down from the house              I like these details. But I

                                                                                                                 wish the ending to this strong

to the highway, and at the bottom next to the highway we had a couple of big             essay were a little stronger.

maple trees. They are gone, and in their place is a couple of brick pillars with a

sign on them. It says “Happy Valley Subdivision.” I was really unhappy when

I looked at that. I realized how happy we had all been on the farm and how

it was all gone, and it never will come back again.

                Notice that Tim concentrated on recording his thoughts and did not worry about correctness. Obviously many errors appear in these pages. Tim has marked some words and sentences that he wants to check during revision. Many ideas in this draft are unclear and far from their final shape. There are problems with language and with form. Here and there the tone is too informal. Some sentences are confused. Some thoughts are repeated unnecessarily.

b              Revise your first draft.

After you complete the first draft of your essay, take a long break. Put some time and distance between you and your writing to clear your mind.

                When you return to your draft, be prepared to reread it carefully several times and to make changes in content, word choice, and sentence structure. As you revise, you will cut some things out and add others. You will change some words, substituting more precise language for generalities. You may want to shift sentences from one place to another or shorten or combine them. Often you may find yourself reorganizing parts of your essay completely.

                Think of a title for your essay. If you have a title already, look at it carefully and revise it, if necessary. It should suit your thesis and should engage the reader’s attention without being too general, too long, or too cute.

                A revised draft can get messy. Whenever yours gets too messy to read easily, rewrite it as a new draft. If you are using a computer, you can mark up your printed copy, make all the changes on the computer, and run off a new and clean printed copy. Writing habits and skills vary, but most writers need to do at least two drafts. Professional writers and good student writers nearly always do more. With computers, counting drafts may be difficult because you may do so much editing from the screen. But it’s always good to print out drafts along the way and to study them as a text off the computer screen.

                When you have produced a readable draft, show it to someone whose opinion you trust. Don’t ask that person, “What do you think of my essay?” The person will almost always say, “I like it.” Ask, rather, “What do you think I am trying to say?” As your friend tells you back what he or she thinks you are trying to say, you may discover that you have not made your purposes clear. Once you and your friendly reader have agreed that the most important issue is what you are trying to say in the essay, you can then discuss some better ways to achieve your purpose. You might want to go in a new direction altogether. Or you might want to straighten out a few confusing places in the essay as you have written it.

                Make things as clear as you can. Many sentences will require radical changes to make your ideas easier to understand. Start by fixing the problems you marked in your first draft. Then answer any questions readers may have raised as they talked with you about your piece of writing. Thereafter, you should check every draft slowly and thoughtfully for errors. Mark your sentence boundaries clearly with periods or other end marks. Look for troublesome verbs, vague pronoun references, and misspelled words.

                The following checklist focuses on key elements to consider when you revise:

points to consider when revising

A.      Revising ideas

1.       Is the thesis clear?

2.       Does the essay speak consistently to the same audience?

3.       Are there enough details to support your major points?

4.       Does the essay show unity? Do all the ideas relate clearly to each other?

5.       Is the paper coherent? Do ideas flow logically and smoothly from one to the other?

6.       Are ideas stated in precise language? Should any words be replaced by more accurate or appropriate ones?

7.       Does each sentence state its information clearly? Is there sentence variety to hold the readers’ interest? When read aloud, do the sentences sound right to the ear?

8.       Are there any unnecessary words that can be eliminated?

B.      Revising for essay structure

1.       Does the introduction capture and hold the reader’s interest?

2.       Does the conclusion complete the ideas established and supported in the essay?

3.       Does the title engage the reader’s attention?

C.      Revising for correctness

1.       Sentence completeness

a.       Are periods and other end marks used to set off complete statements?

b.       Are there any run-on sentences that should be separated by end marks or combined with connecting words and suitable punctuation?

c.        Are there any sentence fragments that can be corrected by joining them to other sentences, by adding subjects or verbs, or both?

2.       Sentence logic

a.       Are parallel ideas expressed in parallel forms?

b.       Have you corrected all the needless shifts in tone or point of view?

c.        Do modifiers stand near enough to the words they describe to avoid ambiguity?

d.       Are the references to pronouns clear?

e.        Do subordinate sections relate correctly to main clauses?

3.       Verbs

a.       Do subjects and verbs agree?

b.       Are verb tenses correctly formed and consistent?

c.        Have you corrected all unnecessary shifts in tense, mood, voice, number, or emphasis?

4.       Punctuation and mechanics

a.       Are punctuation marks clearly and firmly written? Do end marks, commas, colons, and semicolons serve the meaning of sentences? Are apostrophes placed to show possession or contraction?

b.       Are quotation marks used in pairs to set off someone’s exact words?

c.        Do italics, numbers, and symbols follow conventional uses?

d.       Do capital letters follow the conventions of the English language? Is the title of the theme correctly capitalized and punctuated?

e.        Have troublesome words been checked in a dictionary for accurate spelling?

The writer of the preceding draft reconsidered his work carefully. He found some errors in grammar and spelling and some confusion in diction. But he realized that correcting these errors was not the major task he faced. He had to shape the thoughts in this piece of free writing into a coherent essay. That took some careful revising.

He also had to think about his audience. Who would read this essay? How could he make the essay appeal to people who did not know his father and who had no sense of farm life? How could he sustain interest to the end? What was the main problem or issue that he wanted to introduce early in the essay so he could get people to read on to see how it all ended?

He went back to his rough outline and studied it and compared it with his piece of free writing. This process gave him a little better sense of what he wanted to say and how he wanted to shape his essay. He put the draft down beside his keyboard after making some marginal notes to himself, and then wrote the following draft.

His teacher had asked the class to turn in a rough draft so she could comment on it and make suggestions before the students did the final draft. So Tim turned in the following draft to her, and her comments appear at the bottom.

My Father’s Legacy

            I grew up on a small farm in Tennessee about thirty miles southwest of       This is a nice beginning.

                                                                                                                 But see comments at the end.

Knoxville. I left the farm when I was a sophmore in high school because my father               Spelling?

was killed in a car wreck, and I spent the rest of adoliscence in Richmond,                         Spelling?

Virginia. But the memories of farm life and my father’s love of the farm stay             This run-on error makes

                                                                                                                  your idea unclear.

with me more than anything else the experience of growing up on a farm shaped

me as a person.

            We lived on the farm because my father had lived there before us. He

never wanted to leave, although he did recognize that you can’t make a good

living by farming alone nowadays, and he went to college in Virginia and

majored in education and became a school teacher. That way he could teach in.

the nearby county seat town of Bourbonville and bring in some cash to supplement             You can compress this.

what he drew out of the farm. But in any case we stayed on the farm, and he

taught school to make ends meet.

            He was good at his job, and when I was little, he got to be principal                          informal?

of the high school. But his real passion was not teaching but the farm. He never

was happy any place but the farm. He loved it. My mother didn’t feel so hot about                  too informal

living on the farm. I guess I’ve already shown that. She was from Richmond, and              You don’t need this.

her folks were well off. They didn’t think much of my dad. For one thing he

took their only daughter off to Tennessee, and for another he didn’t ever make

any money. She and my father met in college and fell in love, and he persuaded

her to come down to Tennessee despite the fact that her folks didn’t want her to

marry him and then didn’t want her to leave Virginia.

            There were three children in the family. I was the oldest. My brother

Edward was two years younger than me, and my sister Peggy was two years                          informal pronoun?

younger than Edward. Peggy learned to drive the tractor when she was six years

old, and by the time she was eight, she could drive while we put up hay. We had

a couple of tractors. With the big one my father would pull the baler through

the field, dropping off the bound up bales. Me and my brother picked the hay                        pronoun?

bales up after my father had run the baler through the field, and we put them

on the wagon that was pulled behind the tractor, and my sister drove, and

people thought it was wonderful to see an eight-year-old girl driving that tractor

like she’d been doing it all her life. Well, she had been doing it a big part of her life.           You don’t need this.

            My father loved the farm. He loved to drive a tractor, to work on

engines, to plow, to plant things, to put up hay. He gardened, sometimes working

late by the light of the moon when it was full. Sometimes in the summer time he

would make a pot of coffee when he got up around sunrise, and he would walk out

to his garden with a coffee cup and look at the growing things like he was a king

admiring his kingdom.

            My father always wore a suit to his job at the high school. When he

                                                                                                              No reason for a fragment here.

put on his suit in the morning. He became like a different person. He stood up

straight and got quiet and seemed to think about everything he was going to

say before he said anything. The three of us rode to school with him in his old

Ford. He never had much to say to us then. You know how it is. You have

to think about what you’re going to do during the day, and if you have a lot of

teachers and a whole high school full of students depending on you, you have to

think about it. We called this part of his work “suit work” because he wore

a suit to do it. We thought that was funny.                                                                You don’t need this.

            We came home on the school bus because he always worked late.

There were always papers to fill out and letters and reports to write. “Nobody

reads these reports,” he said. “But I still have to write them.” Around five

o’clock he came home, changed into blue jeans or khakis and an old flannel

shirt, and he went out to the garden or to the barn or to the fields to work.

            And everything about him changed then. He was like another

person. He was relaxed and calm and happy. Now he taught us about all the               

incredible things in nature all around us. And he’d talk to us about the                               I like this transition.

different kinds of trees on the place and the different kinds of birds and

different kinds of cows and chickens and even the different kinds of grass.

            My father seemed to know the names of everything. He knew the

loblolly pine and the Virginia pine and the white pine, the difference between

red oak and white oak, and the red maple and the silver maple and the

mountain maple. He knew poison ivy and poison oak and taught us how

to know them and avoid them and how to tell the difference between the

poison sumac that grew in a marshy place and the smooth sumac that grew

in the woods and didn’t raise an itching rash on your skin.

            He loved wild flowers, things that looked like weeds to me were

beautiful to him. He could hold a dandelion and marvel over it like

it was a star that had fallen down to earth. Sometimes we walked in the mountains                   Good simile

a few miles from our house, he always carried a little notebook in his shirt                    Two comma splices to

                                                                                                                     check in this ¶.

pocket, and he wrote down the names of all the flowers he saw. It was a contest

with himself to see how many flowers he could see in a day. Honeysuckle

especially pleased him. He’d pull off some of the little blossoms and show us how

to suck the nectar out of them.

            He loved wild birds. He knew all their names and their habits. Once we

were walking along the edge of a field, and he suddenly laid a hand on my arm and

                                                                                                                       Shorten this sentence?

made me stop and put his other hand up in a gesture of silence, and he pointed                   Make it into several

                                                                                                                        sentences?

towards the ground, and I couldn’t see anything, but then real slow I saw a bird

the color of leaves sitting on a nest. She was just about the color of the leaves

around her, and she was sitting there still as could be and looking at us. “It’s a

woodcock,” he said real quiet. And he made me walk around so we wouldn’t

disturb her. It really makes me feel good on looking back to think about how he

                                                                                                                 I don’t think you need this.

respected nature and didn’t want to disturb anything in nature he didn’t have to;        We can see the man here.

                                                                                                                  You don’t have to tell us

I really loved that about him.                                                                                    your feelings.

            It was fun working with him. He laughed and made us all laugh. He

loved to be out in the open and to have us with him, and when we got through

                                                                                                                      You can compress this ¶.

doing something—getting in the hay, for example—he’d talk about how much

fun it was to work together. Most of it was fun. Hard work but fun.

            He loved to plant things and to watch them grow up. He planted peas

on Valentine’s Day, and when the first green shoots came up out of the soil of

his garden, he said, “I don’t care what the calendar says; it’s spring. It’s really

spring.” And he was happy. He always said we were his finest crop, and he

couldn’t wait to see what fruit we’d bear.

            As it turned out, he didn’t get to see what we turned out to be, he was

killed in a wreck during my sophomore year in high school. A drunk driver hit him

one night when he was coming home after a school board meeting. My father had

a bag of corn seed in the back seat of the car when he was killed. I guess his last

thoughts were about planting something.

            My mother decided to move us back to Richmond. We didn’t want to go.

The farm was home, and we couldn’t think about living anywhere else. But Mom

had family in Richmond, and she didn’t like the farm much anyway.

            This last summer I went back to see my father’s brother who lives in

Knoxville, my uncle Edward. He drove me back to the old homeplace. Nothing

was the same. The house was vanished—bulldozed away, Uncle Edward said.

Streets had been laid out through our fields. Houses had been built along the

streets. It was all very depressing. I realized how happy we had all been on the farm

and how it was all gone, and it never will come back again.

            But I also realized that some things will stay in me as long as I live.

I’ll always remember how the farm brought our family together. I’ll always

remember my father and the things he taught me. I’ll remember the names of the

trees and the names of the birds and how he marveled at the woodcock sitting

on her nest. My Mom’s father, my grandfather, has always said that if my Dad      Tell me more about the

                                                                                                               conflict here. Put it in the first

had spent as much time on business as he spent on birds, he would have left me        paragraph.

a legacy. But he did leave me a legacy even if he didn’t leave me any money.

He took time to notice things that other people never saw. I hope I can always

do the same.

               This is a good draft, and it can be a better one. You have a fine topic—your father’s legacy to you. Be sure that everything in the essay tells us about that legacy.

               You tell us too many times that your father loved the farm. We can tell that from what you tell us about him. Perhaps you used the verb “loved” too much in the essay. It’s a good word. But you don’t want to repeat any word again and again.

               Your conclusion has a good idea. But I’d like to see you think about it a little and develop it more. One of the most interesting remarks is what your grandfather said about your father and the birds. I know that may be painful for you, but you might work that up into a theme for the essay.

               Note the places where I have marked some errors in the margins of your essay. These errors are easily fixed.

               Now and then I’ve suggested that you rewrite a sentence, especially when you get a little too informal. I won’t rewrite the sentence for you. But take a look at the places I have marked to see if you can make them clearer, better. Watch for comma splices.

               Shorten the piece. It’s too long as it stands. I’m looking forward to the final draft of this essay. You’re telling a good story well.

c              Proofread your essay for error.

Both before and after you prepare your final draft, comb your essay for mechanical mistakes and correct them. This step is called proofreading. Proofreading requires careful examination of each line on the page. Proofread your last rough draft before you turn it into your final draft, and proofread again as you prepare your final draft for submission. Hold a ruler or a blank sheet of paper beneath the line you are studying. Examine each sentence carefully for missing words and punctuation. Check each word carefully for missing or incorrect letters. Proofreading an essay by reading backwards from the last sentence to the first is another good technique. It helps you to focus on isolated units and to catch errors easily overlooked in the context of surrounding sentences. Some writers touch the point of a pencil to each syllable to help them read more slowly. It is always a good idea to read your essay slowly aloud to yourself.

                Tim has an advantage in that his teacher read a rough draft of his essay and made some suggestions about changes. Many teachers do not have time to read rough drafts, and so you may be on your own when you prepare your final draft. That is all the more reason for you to pay careful attention to what you do.

d              Prepare the final draft.

Follow your instructor’s guidelines for correct manuscript preparation in each course. The essays you submit for your instructor’s evaluation must be clean and relatively free of handwritten corrections. But it is always better to write in a correction than to turn in clean pages with misspellings or other obvious errors.

                Remember that your instructor must grade many essays, remaining alert and careful through them all. Messy writings make life hard for the busy teacher. But sometimes you will find a mistake in an essay just as you are ready to hand it in. Always correct the mistake, but do so as neatly as you can.

general manuscript requirements

Margins

1.       Leave margins of 1¼ or 1½ inches at the top, sides, and bottom of each page. Do not fold margins. You can mark off the four marginal areas with light pencil lines to keep your words from straying into them.

2.       Indent all paragraphs.

Title

1.       Center the title on the first page, 1½ inches below the top margin, or on the first line for handwritten copies.

2.       Leave one line of space below the title.

3.       Capitalize the first letter of all major words in the title, including the first and last words, no matter what part of speech they are.

Jumping for Fitness and Popularity

4.       Capitalize the first letter of prepositions of four or more letters.

Once Upon Life’s Highway

5.       Do not use a period at the end of the title; do not underline the title or enclose it in quotation marks.

6.       A title on the cover page requires all-capital letters. If you use a cover page, use the title again at the top of the first page of your manuscript.

Cover page

The cover page usually includes your name, your class number, the submission date, and the professor’s name. However, your instructor may have different requirements.

Format

1.       Write on one side of each page only.

2.       Number all pages consecutively, starting with page two of your composition. The first page is not numbered but is considered page one nonetheless. (Do not count the cover page or, if you submit one, the outline page.)

3.       Use arabic numbers in the upper right hand corner or centered at the top of each page. Be consistent in whatever form or pagination you use.

Typed and word-processed essays

1.       Use 8½ X 11 unlined white bond paper, not onionskin, and not the paper treated to allow corrections with paper erasers. (Erasable paper smudges easily and often becomes unreadable.)

2.       Use only black ribbon; if the type looks faded, change the ribbon. Nothing is so hard for a teacher as to be forced to make out an almost illegible essay typed with an exhausted ribbon.

3.       Double-space between lines; indent paragraphs five spaces.

4.       After periods, question marks, exclamation points, and colons, use two spaces; after commas and semicolons, use one space.

5.       Do not use a space before or after a hyphen. To type a dash, use two consecutive hyphens (--) without any spacing between the dash and the words on each side.

Dashes--as in the example--set off thoughts for emphasis.

6.       Make corrections with a typewriter eraser, a correcting tape on the typewriter, or with correction fluid. Do not strike over incorrect letters. For minor errors discovered after you have removed your pages from the typewriter, use a pen with blue or black ink.

7.       If you use a computer, be sure you have not left in words you intended to delete or deleted words you intended to leave in.

8.       Type should be clean enough to make clear, sharp letters.

9.       Dot matrix printers used with word processors should have true descenders. That is, the tails of the letters g, j, p, q, and y should come down below the baseline for the rest of the type.

10.    Remember to use adequate margins.

11.    In general, a manuscript prepared on a word processor is more readable if the right margin is not justified. Printers with proportional spacing may justify the right margin.

12.    If you use a computer printer with tractor-fed continuous-form paper, be sure you tear off the perforated strip on each side of the paper, and be sure to separate each page.

Handwritten essays

1.       Use 8½ X 11 paper with lines spaced about ⅜ inch apart. (For a clear layout, you can skip every other line.)

2.       Use blue or black ink; write on one side only.

3.       Indent the first line of every paragraph about an inch.

4.       Make occasional corrections with an ink eraser or correction fluid, or draw a neat line through words you want to delete. Write in the new words above the deletions, using skipped lines and marginal space for additions.

5.       Make your handwriting readable. Use firm, clear periods at the end of sentences, and leave space before the next sentence. Dot i’s and j’s directly above the letter. Avoid loops and curlicues, especially when you make capital letters. Make sure readers can distinguish between the r and the n, the v and the u, the o and the a, the l and the t, and the e and the i. Be careful to round off the letter h so it does not look like the letter l and i. Be sure to make the letters m and n so they do not look like the letter u combined with another letter or standing alone.

Here is the first page of the final typed essay on farm life.

My Father’s Legacy By Timothy S. Lee English 101 Professor Eileen Johnson Section 17-F-1 September 19, 1999

e              Make the necessary changes and corrections after your instructor has commented on your essay.

When your instructor returns your graded essay, read it over carefully. Study the summary remarks that describe the strengths and weaknesses of your work. Examine the marginal notations, and be prepared to make revisions based on the commentary you find there.

                You can learn to prevent errors next time around by correcting your mistakes and by responding to suggestions about style, form, and content.

                As you reread your essay, correct all the errors and make required revisions. Pay special attention to places where your instructor may have asked for more information. If, for example, you mention a name, your instructor may ask for more identification. You may have written this: “According to John Simon, the English language is in decline.” Your instructor may write, “Who is John Simon?” You should revise by saying, “According to John Simon, literary critic and author of Paradigms Lost, the English language is in decline.” If you don’t understand a comment or a symbol, make an appointment to discuss the essay with your instructor.

guidelines for making corrections on evaluated essays

1.       Follow your instructor’s guidelines for revisions. Some instructors read drafts and make comments before the essay goes into final form. Others encourage full rewriting based on comments written on final drafts. Be sure to correct errors before you do complete revisions of graded essays.

2.       Learn the symbol and comment system your instructor uses.

3.       Make all corrections called for by marking symbols and comments. Use a pencil or a different color of ink to make corrections so that your instructor can readily see what you have done.

4.       Write short corrections clearly, directly above the error noted by your instructor.

5.       Rewrite any weak sentences in the margin (if there is room) or on the reverse side of the page. If you rewrite on the reverse side of the page, put an arrow in the margin to let your instructor know to turn the page over to see your revision.

6.       Keep a record of your mistakes from theme to theme. Any writer tends to fall into patterns of error. If you keep a record of your errors, you can discover your own patterns and so be on the lookout for the errors you are most likely to make.

Here is the final draft of the essay “My Father’s Legacy,” accompanied by commentary from the instructor, who used questions, marking symbols, and suggestions for revision.

My Father’s Legacy

            “If your father had been as interested in business as he was in birds,                Good beginning. You

                                                                                                                       set some tensions at the

he might have left you a legacy.” That was the growling comment of my grandfather,          start.

my mother’s father, last year when I went back to see the farm where I grew up

in Tennessee. My grandfather had not wanted his daughter to marry my father;

and once they were married he did not want her to go off to live on a farm.

            We lived on the farm because my father never wanted to leave the place

where he had grown up. His father barely made a living off the farm, and my

father knew he would have to have outside income to make ends meet of he stayed

on the place. So he got a scholarship to a college in Virginia, supplemented the

                                                                                                                      Good sentence. Nice use

scholarship with a part-time job as a janitor in a college building, majored in                    of verbs.

education and became a school teacher.

            He and my mother met in an English class. They were required read             Insert “to” before “read”

each other’s essays before handing them in to the teacher. He wrote an essay

about birds, she was surprised that a man would be interested in such things.                 Comma splice?

And that was how it started.

            Her parents—especially her father—objected to the marriage from

the first. Her father told her that my father would never make any money.

They did not want her to live on a farm far from home. They never came to                        How sad!

visit as long as we lived there.

            Mother loved the city with its broad streets, its people, and its things

to do. She studied to be an architect, and she wanted to live in a city where

architects could find work. I don’t think she was happy on the farm. Perhaps

she was not happy with my father. Once when she was angry at him, my mom said,

“You don’t have any ambition.” She apologized again and again for saying that,

but it may have been true. Still, she never complained much except when she had to

fight off the cockroaches that came in from the woods or when she ran into snakes

in her flower garden or when the roof leaked because the house was so old and my

father was to busy to fix it.                                                                                              too busy?

            My father eventually became principal of the high school in nearby Bourbonville.

But his real passion was the farm and the natural world that thrived there.

            He sang when he drove a tractor, and at a distance we could hear his tenor

voice rising above and carrying beyond the puttering sound of the gasoline

engine. He gardened, sometimes working late by the light of the moon when it                          Nice free modifier.

was full. Sometimes he made a pot of coffee when he got up around sunrise, and

he walked out to his garden with a coffee cup and looked at the growing things

like a king admiring his kingdom.

            I was the oldest child. My brother Edward was two years younger

than I, and my sister Peggy was two years younger than Edward. My father

taught Peggy how to drive a tractor when she was six years old. By the time

she was eight, she could drive while we put up hay. We had two tractors. With

the big one my father would pull the baler through the field, dropping off the bales.

Edward and I lifted the bales onto the flat-bed wagon pulled behind the

tractor that my sister drove.

            We always had something to talk about with each other—the new calf,

the work we would do that day or the work we had done, the angus cow that had

butted down a fence post yet again and run off into the neighborhood, the king

snake my mother found in the robins mud-plastered nest in the yard and the                      apostrophe?

crys all the other birds made around the snake as he made his meal on the                           plural?

robin’s blue eggs.

            We learned what we were good at and what we were bad at. “Nobody

can be good at everything,” my father said. I got to be good at working on

engines, but Edward loved to read. “Just like his namesake, my brother,” my

father said. He was proud of the good grades Edward made in school. But he was

also proud because Peggy loved engines, and by the time she was eleven, he had

taught her to be a fine mechanic.

            My father always wore a suit to his job at the high school. When he put

on his suit in the morning he became a different person. He stood up straight and

got quiet and seemed to think about everything he was going to say before he

said anything. He drove us to school in his old Ford. He never had much to say

to us on those mornings. He seemed absorbed in the work he was going to have

to do that day—“suit work,” we called it, the work of being a school

principal. And when my father put on his suit, we took it as a signal that we

should be quiet.

            We came home on the school bus because he always worked late. He

always had papers to fill out and letters and reports to write. Around five

o’clock he came home, changed into blue jeans or khakis and an old flannel

shirt, and he went out to the garden or to the barn or to the fields to work.

            Everything about him changed then. He was relaxed and calm and               You repeat these thens

                                                                                                                    very close to each other.

happy. He wasn’t the school principal then; he was our teacher, and the farm                Another word?

was our book. He taught us about the different kinds of trees on the place

and the different kinds of birds and different kinds of cows and chickens and even

the different kinds of grass.

            He seemed to know the names of everything. He knew the loblolly                             plural?

pine and the Virginia pine and the white pine. He knew the red maple and the

silver maple and the mountain maple. He knew poison ivy and poison oak

and taught us how to know them and avoid them and how to tell the

difference between the poison sumac that grew in a marshy place along the

creek in the lower field and the harmless, smooth sumac that grew in the woods.

            Plants that were weeds to me were wild flowers to him. He could hold

a dandelion and admire it as if it were a star fallen to earth. Sometimes we

drove over to the mountains a few miles from our house and took hikes on

Sunday afternoons, especially in the Spring when it was first getting warm.                         capital letter?

He always carried a little notebook in his shirt pocket, and he wrote down the

names of all the flowers he saw. It was a contest with himself to see how many

flowers he could see in a day. When the honeysuckle was blooming. He’d pull off                       fragment?

some of the little blossoms and show us how to suck the nectar out of them.

“It’s natural candy,” he said. “And it doesn’t rot your teeth.”

            He saw things we sometimes might have missed. Once we were walking

along the edge of a field, and he suddenly laid a hand on my arm and made me stop

and put his other hand up in a gesture of silence, and he pointed towards the

ground. I couldn’t see anything at first except the dried grass, but then I saw a

bird the color of leaves sitting on a nest. “It’s a woodcock,” he said real quiet.

And he made me walk around the nest so we wouldn’t disturb her.

            He loved to plant things and to watch them grow up. He planted peas

on Valentine’s Day, and when the first shoots came up out of the soil of his

garden, he said, “I don’t care what the calendar says; its spring. Its really spring.”                        it’s?

And he was happy. He always said we were his finest crop, and he couldn’t wait

to see what fruit we’d bear.

            My father was killed in a wreck during my sophomore year in high

school. A drunk driver hit him one night when he was coming home after a

school board meeting. My father had a bag of corn seed in the back seat of the car

when he was killed. His last thoughts must have been about planting something.

            A developer bought our farm. My mother moved us back to Richmond,

to her family, and she went back to being an architect. And we have lived well.

            This last summer for the first time in almost three years, I went back

to visit my father’s brother, my Uncle Edward, in Knoxville. He drove me

back to the old homeplace. Nothing was the same. The house had vanished—

bulldozed away, Uncle Edward said. Streets had been laid out through our fields.

Houses were built or being built along the streets.

            My grandfather was wrong. True, my father did not leave me any money.

But he left me the memory of his pleasure at hard work and growing things, his

                                                                                                                   Much better ending. It

good humor, his love, his silent wonder at the sight of the woodcock nesting in the           matches your introduction.

grass against a background of leaves. I remember how much he hoped for all of us.

And I remember all the times he said, “Good job. Good job.” He made me

believe I can do a good job and be happy with what I have, and that is a legacy

beyond anything my grandfather can imagine.

               This is a very nice piece that evokes both sadness and pleasure. You have a clear thesis now, and you stay with it all the way through. I like the way you begin with the word legacy and end with it. I enjoyed the many good stories you tell. But you never do tell us any of your father’s faults. Surely he had some. You might talk about them just enough to make more believable all the good memories you have of him. He sounds like a great person, and he will still be great if you admit some shortcomings.

               Now and then your language is a little too informal. And I think some parts of the essay don’t fit together as well as they should. I’ve marked some places where you might weave things together a little better. Try to work on those comma splices.

               But this is a good essay, and I enjoyed reading it.

chapter four

Writing Strong Paragraphs

Paragraphs divide a text up into manageable units that organize writing and make reading easier. The first sentence of a paragraph is indented several spaces from the left margin of the page. The indentation serves as a signal; it lets us know when a paragraph begins; it tells us that the paragraph before the indentation has ended.

                Without paragraphs, any printed text would appear as a long, monotonous column of type. We are so familiar with the appearance of paragraphs that we often take them for granted. But they became common only in the nineteenth century as a device to break up the sameness of appearance on the printed page. The paragraph then proved to be valuable as a means of breaking up a long discourse into smaller units of meaning—a sort of processing of thought into bite-sized intellectual chunks for the mind of both writer and reader alike.

                The history of the paragraph as a printer’s device should help you recall an essential fact about them: paragraphs do not stand alone; they are not essays in themselves. Once in a while you may write a single paragraph for some special purpose—as a caption to a picture, for example, or as a brief memo in an office. But much more commonly, paragraphs are not written for their own sake but as part of the flow of a larger text. In a college writing course, paragraphs form steps along the way to making the point that a writer wants an essay to make. Paragraphs have meaning as they are joined together to reach the goal of the essay.

                Paragraphs usually comprise several sentences. Those sentences usually support a main point, some train of thought that binds the sentences together in a common purpose. Another way of thinking of a paragraph is to visualize it as a team of horses pulling a wagon; the horses are sentences; the wagon is the general idea that those sentences carry along in the essay. The sentences have to be connected and carefully arranged if they are to pull their load. Otherwise the lines will get tangled up, and the thought will become hopelessly confused.

a              Build unified paragraphs.

We expect paragraphs to have some common purpose, some point that all the sentences of the paragraph work together to make. Paragraphs achieve unity if they support a controlling idea.

1                     Give each paragraph a controlling idea.

Every paragraph should have a controlling idea, a main thought that all of its sentences support and clarify. Often a lead sentence will express that controlling idea as a generalization:

               Everyone knows that sports teams must have nicknames, but selecting an appropriate one is fraught with peril. Alabama, for instance, may be proud of the Crimson Tide, but it sounds like a bloodbath or a serious algae problem. Notre Dame’s famous jocks are ossified as the Fighting Irish, though Hibernian-American athletes are about as rare in South Bend as they are on the Boston Celtics. Nothing exposed the nickname crisis more than the 1982 NCAA basketball championship game played between the Georgetown Hoyas and the North Carolina Tar Heels. Even if you know what a hoya or a tarheel is, the only sensible strategy is to forget it. (For those overwhelmed by a need to know, hoya is short for Hoya saxa! a garbled Greek and Latin cheer meaning “What rocks!,” and tarheel originated during the Civil War as a disparaging term for folks from the Carolina pine forests.) Few knew what Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons were when a pro basketball team played under that name. (They were players owned by Fred Zollner, who also happened to own a piston factory in Fort Wayne.) The early vogue of naming a team for a person seems to have come to an end with Paul Brown, the original coach of the Cleveland Browns. Fans who found the cult of personality distasteful at least were grateful that he wasn’t named Stumblebrenner.

John Leo

[This paragraph begins with a general statement made, tongue in cheek, about the oddities of the nicknames for athletic teams. Having made that broad statement, John Leo fills his paragraph with supporting information.]

                How do you define a controlling idea? The traditional method has been to put it into a topic sentence, a general statement usually coming at the beginning of the paragraph and supported by all the following sentences. A topic sentence may limit and define the topic by presenting a strong opinion or an attitude about it. That is what writer John Leo does in the humorous paragraph quoted above. Or the topic sentence may make a simple statement of fact that will be supported by later sentences in the paragraph.

                You can often add to the clarity of your writing by shaping the first sentence in a paragraph to express, in exact language, the controlling idea you want to convey. Compare the following topic sentences:

1.       My father spent the first years of his childhood in Chicago.

2.       My father spent the first years of a difficult childhood in Chicago.

Both these sentences make a general statement about a topic—the father’s childhood in Chicago. But no controlling assertion gives direction to the topic in sentence 1. Many things happen in childhood.

                In a good paragraph, the writer selects details that develop a central idea. And in some paragraphs that central idea is expressed by a topic sentence that is a sort of general summary of what the rest of the paragraph is about. In the paragraph below, the first sentence makes a broad and general statement; the second sentence develops the general statement more specifically. The paragraph that comes after it will report difficulties in the father’s childhood that will show how hard it was. See how the limited topic sentence works in the following paragraph.

               My father spent the first years of a difficult childhood in Chicago. His father deserted the family, leaving a wife and five small children. At age eight, my father was the oldest. His mother had to take in washing and had to clean house for rich people on Michigan Avenue just to keep her family together. My father cleaned up yards for ten cents an hour when he was eleven. He got a paper route when he was twelve and had to crawl out of bed at five in the morning, seven days a week, winter and summer, to deliver the papers before breakfast. He gave all the money he made to his mother for family expenses. Because they could not afford doctors, my father was left partly deaf by a childhood disease.

[Every sentence in the paragraph supports the general statement made in the topic sentence. Every detail illustrates the idea of a difficult childhood to back up the general assertion made at the beginning.]

                In the following paragraphs, each topic sentence makes a generalization that limits and controls the topic.

               Although smoking has been a popular habit for centuries, it has always had its enemies. Some American Indians advised young braves not to smoke too much because tobacco would cut their wind in a hunt or in battle. King James I of England called smoking “a branch of the sin of drunkenness, which is the root of all sins.” Ben Johnson, the playwright, said smoking was “good for nothing but to choke a man and fill him full of smoke and embers.” Popular slang called cigarettes “coffin nails” long before the medical evidence on the harm from smoking was complete. Now every package of cigarettes and every advertisement for cigarettes must carry a warning from the Surgeon General that smoking is injurious to health.

Dick Curry

[The first sentence announces the topic, asserting that smoking has always had its enemies. Note how this topic sentence helps the writer limit and control the paragraph. Every sentence that follows supports this main idea.]

               Teenagers are almost endemic to the mall—some of them are so fiercely loyal that they call themselves “Mall Rats.” Such self-confessed examples include Michelle and her friends, teenagers of both sexes between the ages of 12 and 15, who hang out at Hillsdale Shopping Center near San Francisco. “A Mall Rat is someone who is here every day,” Michelle says. The primary reason is social; it’s where kids strut their stuff. “We put on our cool faces and walk around and try to meet girls, and scare all the other guys,” says Dan, who frequents Detroit malls. The loyalty of Mall Rats is sometimes extreme. When his family moved, one boy in the Washington, D.C. area insisted on bicycling five miles every day to his old mall so he could be with his friends.

William Severini Kowinski

[The topic sentence comes first; it provides an organizing framework for the sentences that follow. The topic sentence tells the reader why the writer has chosen these details to present and gives direction to the paragraph.]

                But many paragraphs do not begin with a summary topic sentence. Paragraphs that tell stories, paragraphs that describe, even some paragraphs that explain do not have a general statement that unites everything else in the paragraph. The absence of a topic sentence in many paragraphs is a legacy of paragraph history. As we said above, paragraphs do not stand by themselves; they take their place within a flow of discourse, and so the meaning of some paragraphs depends on what comes before them in other paragraphs.

                Always the most important sentence in setting the stage for the paragraph is the first sentence, even if it does not tell you much about the topic. The first sentence announces the subject, and the rest of the paragraph develops its controlling idea by building on some thought expressed in the first sentence. The controlling idea may not be specifically expressed in a sentence of its own, but when you read a good paragraph you can always express its controlling idea in a sentence if you set yourself to doing so.

                Sometimes the first sentence simply introduces the topic for the paragraph without summarizing what will be said about the topic. The second sentence may then be a summary of what is to come.

               The steam locomotive evokes nostalgia among many people. The nostalgia is better than the experience of the steam locomotive ever was. The steam locomotive was a dirty, dangerous, and generally disagreeable companion to American life for well over a century. It spread filthy black smoke over large areas of every city it served, and it usually left a thick film of oily grime on the face of every passenger in the cars behind it. It started fires along the sides of the tracks in woods and fields. It was so heavy that it pounded rails until they broke, and when it crashed and turned over—as it frequently did—it poured deadly fire and steam on the fireman and the engineer in the cab. It had so many moving parts under high stress that it often broke down, stranding passengers for hours. And it was absurdly inefficient and costly to operate.

[The second sentence is a summary topic sentence in this paragraph. It tells you that the paragraph will describe the disadvantages of steam locomotives. But the first sentence leads into the topic, even though it does not tell you what the paragraph will say about steam locomotives. Everything else in the paragraph takes the lead from the topic introduced in the first sentence.]

                Sometimes the first sentence in the first paragraph of a longer work will begin the description of a scene. Several similar sentences will follow. The final sentence in this type of first paragraph may sum up the scene and explain why it is important to the meaning that the paragraph expresses. Or a following paragraph may explain the scene depicted in the first. Such scene-setting first paragraphs are often used to begin articles in popular magazines because they make readers want to know what is going to happen next. Although the first sentence in such a paragraph is not, strictly speaking, a topic sentence, it sets the direction for what comes next and introduces the controlling idea of the paragraph.

               The bands are marching, the tailgates swinging open for the ritual of picnics and parties. The beverages are heady, the boosterism infectious, the old school colors vivid and bright. This is college football, as the television slogan goes, a great way to spend an autumn afternoon.

Newsweek

[A summary topic sentence comes last, uniting all the concrete details in the earlier sentences and explaining why the writer has put them in. But the first sentence introduces the topic, even though it does not make a general statement about it.]

                Often an introductory paragraph in an essay or an article simply tells a story. The first sentence begins with a striking detail, and the following sentences build on it. A later paragraph introduces the topic that the story illustrates. The role of the first sentence in such a paragraph is to catch the interest of readers and to make them keep on reading.

               Georges Randrianasolo, Madagascar’s leading naturalist, grabbed the doorframe of our descending helicopter and stared uneasily at the limestone pinnacles below us. From horizon to horizon, erosion had sculptured rock into spires a hundred feet tall, some whetted so thin at their peaks that the setting sun gleamed as if sinking behind an entire skyline of Empire State Building. Malagasy—the people of Madagascar—call these rocks tsingy, or spikes, and say that in the tsingy there is hardly enough flat land to plant your whole foot.

Alison Jolly

[The first sentence in this opening paragraph from a National Geographic article about Madagascar sets a dramatic scene by telling a story about landing by helicopter in a dangerous region of Madagascar, an island nation off the southeastern coast of Africa. The rest of the article describes Madagascar and relates many of its problems and opportunities.]

                When a paragraph begins by stating the controlling idea in general terms, the second sentence often limits the idea. The rest of the paragraph builds then on that second sentence. In the following paragraph, the first sentence makes a general statement about how the police of Birmingham, Alabama, handled the arrest of civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s. The second sentence makes a limiting statement about the general subject introduced in the first. The rest of the paragraph flows from the more limiting statement to the topic sentence that is the next to the last sentence in the paragraph.

               It is true that they have been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been rather publicly “nonviolent.” But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Maybe Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent as Chief Prichett was in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of flagrant racial injustice. T. S. Eliot has said that there is no greater treason than to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

[The first sentence introduces a topic Dr. King now addresses after having told many of the details of police conduct during the demonstrations for civil rights in Birmingham. The police did not beat demonstrators as they had often done in the past; but they did arrest them and put them in jail. Having introduced this topic, Dr. King thinks about its meaning, and he condemns the motivation of those making the arrests. Once he wrote the first sentence, he committed himself to exploring what he meant by it. A first sentence in a paragraph always commits a writer to exploring some meaning contained in that sentence.]

                Some paragraphs introduce the topic with a direct quotation that focuses attention on the information to come. But again, the general subject of the paragraph is signaled by the first sentence. Here is a paragraph from David Donald’s biography of the writer Thomas Wolfe introducing the chapter on how Wolfe broke into print. Note how he uses a quotation from a letter to Wolfe’s sister Mabel to introduce a paragraph that develops the thesis of this chapter.

               “My greatest deficiency is a total lack of salesmanship,” Wolfe wrote Mabel while he was still working on his novel. He recalled that in trying to place his plays he had sent to only two or three producers and, when they did not respond promptly, had peremptorily demanded that they be returned. “I have never known where to go, where to turn, or what to do,” he explained, but he predicted: “This time, certain friends will probably attend to that part of it for me.”

David Herbert Donald

[The first sentence announces that the rest of the paragraph will concern Wolfe’s difficulties and hopes involved in getting his first novel published. The sentence does not summarize the rest of the paragraph as we might expect a standard topic sentence to do. But it does introduce a subject that will be treated in the other sentences.]

                Some paragraphs introduce the topic by posing a question at the beginning. The rest of the paragraph offers some kind of response to the question. The response may be a firm answer, or it may suggest an answer or report an answer that someone has given. In the following paragraph, the biographer of the poet William Carlos Williams reports on Williams's response to the question in the first sentence. (Ed is the poet’s brother.)

               But wasn’t truth, after all, an act of intuitive faith, something that left poor logic behind? Truth, he told Ed that same month, was not something reasoned out but something intuitively grasped, something believed in. “Don’t reason from feelings or rather don’t reason at all,” he told his brother. For he saw now that truth was not something arrived at by syllogisms and proofs, but something grasped by a quantum leap of faith. Truth was, after all, an intuitive insight into the essence of a thing, something radiantly perceived in a moment.

Paul Mariani

Compendium

                The paragraphs you have examined so far demonstrate the range of possibilities writers have developed for making their topics clear. The main idea in a paragraph may appear in a topic sentence that expresses a dominant impression about the topic. The topic sentence may be a general summary statement. It may also be a limited statement that the rest of the paragraph develops. This summary of the paragraph may appear in the first sentence or in the middle or at the end—or such a summary statement may not appear at all. Whether or not the topic of the paragraph is directly stated and summarized, it must be clear. Both writer and reader should be able to say in a sentence what the paragraph is about. The first sentence always leads into the topic in some way, usually by mentioning a word that the rest of the paragraph will develop.

                The standard topic sentence is most valuable when you are writing paragraphs about ideas, when you are explaining something, or when you are making an argument. Such paragraphs usually help an essay develop its thesis step by step. The topic sentences define those steps clearly and help both writer and reader know where they are going. In narratives and in descriptions you may often write paragraphs that do not have a topic sentence. But in all paragraphs, the first sentence should have a word or words that are developed in the following sentences. When you write that first sentence, pause a moment and think of what words in it introduce the main ideas you want to express in the paragraph. Then explore those ideas.

Exercise 1. Write a couple of pages very swiftly on something that happened to you recently—a parking problem, a talk with a friend about some important event, some victory that you had, something good or something bad that happened to you. Don’t pause much over your composition. Get it on paper quickly. Now study your composition and see how the first sentence in each of your paragraphs introduced the subject you explored in the rest of the paragraph. You will usually discover that when you write quickly about something that happened to you recently, your paragraphs develop naturally.

                Now write a couple of pages about something you have been thinking about lately—the ideas expressed in a difficult course, something you have been reading about in the newspapers, some thoughts that have been on your mind. See if the paragraphs you construct develop naturally from the first sentence. How many of your paragraphs have a standard topic sentence in them?

Exercise 2. For a paragraph on each of the ten topics below, construct a topic sentence that states the topic and offers an opinion about it, an attitude toward it, or a reaction to it.

1.       Reactions against terrorism

2.       Looking for a summer job during college

3.       Advertisements for cigarettes

4.       Studying efficiently

5.       The pleasures of reading

6.       The value of learning to write well

7.       The most popular music group now recording

8.       The way rock stars rise and fall

9.       Volunteer work for public service during college

10.    The value of your favorite form of exercise

Exercise 3. State the topic of each of the following paragraphs in your own words. Then tell whether or not the writer states that topic in a topic sentence. Also, explain what words in the first sentence of each paragraph are developed as the subject for the paragraph itself.

               Hutton hiked to the margins of glaciers in the heights of the Alps—great seas of ice, in some places thousands of feet thick. Glaciers can last almost as long as the lofty mountain peaks on which they lie; the ice melts a little each summer but is replenished by fresh snows each winter. Hutton noticed boulders embedded in the ice of some glaciers, and more boulders lying on the slopes just below them, rock and rubble that the ice had apparently picked up from the ground as it grew, and then dropped again when it shrank. Hutton put two and two together. Some of these Swiss glaciers, he decided, must once have flowed down from their eminences and filled more than a few Swiss valleys. The glaciers must have plucked up thousands of boulders as they traveled forward and then dropped their loads when they receded, the way a tide strews pebbles on a beach—hence the misfit boulders lying in the valleys, far from any modern glacier.

               This insight, like many of Hutton’s finest, was unpopular in his lifetime. Misfit boulders, or erratic blocks, had long been considered to be irrefutable evidence of Noah’s Flood. They were supposed to have been tumbled up hills and down dales by the churning biblical waters. In those days, many people felt as if a dark crack were slowly widening between the world as explained by science and the world as revealed in Holy Writ. Any hypothesis that threatened to widen the crack was frightening. A theory that both geologists and theologians could respect was accepted with gratitude and relief. So the Flood theory prevailed, and Hutton’s was ignored.

Jonathan Weiner

               There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow. The powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. The result will be that he will perhaps get some money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hard-working man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow’s undertaking, any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer to finish my education at a different school.

Henry David Thoreau

               More than Northerners, civilians of the South found that the war affected every facet of their daily lives. Almost from the beginning Confederates began to feel the pinch of the shortages. Theirs was an agricultural society, primarily devoted to raising cotton and tobacco. When the war closed Northern markets and the Union blockade cut off those in Europe, bales and hogsheads piled up. Confederate authorities urged farmers to grow grain instead. Having the utmost confidence in Jefferson Davis, “our worthy President (at once soldier and statesman),” the Jones family willingly responded to this appeal. Cotton planting at 2,000-acre Arcadia, largest of their plantations, was limited in the 1862 season to one acre for every field hand. Wrote Charles C. Jones, Jr., approvingly: “Every bushel of corn and blade of grass will be greatly needed for the support of our armies.”

We Americans

2                     Make all sentences in a paragraph support the main idea.

Every paragraph needs a logical structure based on the main point of the paragraph. The succession of sentences and the flow of ideas help bring that structure about. Any sentence that distracts readers from the main idea violates the architecture of the paragraph. In the following paragraph, several sentences wander away from the main idea.

               After vigorous exercise, the body enters a dangerous period that cooling off can help prevent. When you are swimming or running, a large blood supply from the heart brings your arms and legs the oxygen required for muscle activity. The human heart works like a pump. When the right upper chamber of the heart (the auricle) fills with blood, blood rushes down into the right lower chamber (the ventricle). When the chamber fills, the strong muscles in its wall pump tired blood into an artery that speeds the blood to the lungs. As you exercise, the muscles squeeze, and blood going back to the heart gets an added push as long as you move your limbs. But if you stop suddenly, all this extra blood stays there: your arm and leg muscles are no longer helping your heart pump the blood around. Blood that remains in the arms and legs is blood kept away from vital organs like the brain. But if you cool off, that is, slow down your activity gradually, you’ll help bring your pulse rate and your body temperature down slowly, you’ll help your muscles rid themselves of metabolic waste, and, most important, you’ll keep the blood flowing normally through your body.

[The controlling idea of this paragraph may be stated like this: Stopping vigorous exercise suddenly can cause a strain on the heart and other body organs, but a gradual cooling off after activity can prevent serious problems. Now look at the sentences in boldface. These details of how the heart operates are interesting. But they distract the reader from the controlling idea of the paragraph. These sentences have no place here, though they may work well in another part of the composition. The paragraph is clearer and reads more smoothly with the distracting sentences removed.]

                Check the sentences in your paragraphs carefully against your main idea, and remove any sentences that do not support the main idea.

Exercise 4. Write out the controlling idea for each of the following paragraphs. Explain how each sentence in each paragraph supports that controlling idea.

               Psychophysicists who study food tastes have found four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. There are wider variations in what people call sweet or bitter than in what they call sour or salty—variations we are only now beginning to understand. We have found, too, that there is not one but a number of receptor mechanisms in the mouth for bitterness, which may explain why people are sensitive to some bitter foods and not others. We have also discovered that certain substances can suppress one or more of the four tastes.

Linda Bartoshuk

               Some children dedicate themselves to being ridiculous, their behavior conjuring up memories of old Mack Sennett comedies and floppy-footed clowns. We have encountered a considerable number of these children in our counselling work over the last two decades. They are usually brought in for evaluation and treatment as “behavior problems”; they may be doing badly in school, be in conflict with everyone in the family, or have threatened to run away from home. Whatever the immediate difficulty, we have been impressed in each case with a theatrical clumsiness, a clownish awkwardness.

Seymour and Rhoda Lee Fisher

               To begin with, there was the nature of the country. The front line, ours and the Fascists’, lay in positions of immense natural strength, which as a rule could only be approached from one side. Provided a few trenches have been dug, such places cannot be taken by infantry, except in overwhelming numbers. In our own position or most of those round us a dozen men with two machine-guns could have held off a battalion. Perched on the hill-tops as we were, we should have made lovely marks for artillery; but there was no artillery. Sometimes I used to gaze round the landscape and long—oh how passionately!—for a couple of batteries of guns. One could have destroyed the enemy positions one after another as easily as smashing nuts with a hammer. But on our side the guns simply did not exist. The Fascists did occasionally manage to bring a gun or two from Zaragoza and fire a very few shells, so few that they never even found the range and the shells plunged harmlessly into the empty ravines. Against machine-guns and without artillery there are only three things you can do: dig yourself in at a safe distance—four hundred yards, say—advance across the open and be massacred, or make small-scale night-attacks that will not alter the general situation. Practically, the alternatives are stagnation or suicide.

George Orwell

b              Use a variety of methods to build coherent paragraphs.

In coherent paragraphs, thoughts and pieces of information follow one after the other, connected in ways that are easy for readers to see and understand. Writers use various methods to make these connections and to make ideas flow smoothly so that readers do not feel that something has been left out, that questions have been unanswered, or that new information has been suddenly introduced without reason. As you use these methods, you must think carefully about the sequence of ideas you follow in each paragraph.

                You can achieve coherence by carefully arranging the information in a paragraph. The arrangement requires you to look carefully at the first sentence in the paragraph to see what ideas in it you want to develop in the following sentence. To make the paragraph coherent, the ideas in the second sentence must be closely related to the ideas in the first.

                Pronouns help coherence by referring to nouns that have already been introduced and identified. You can also help coherence by repeating important words or phrases, by using parallel structures, and by using transitional words and expressions. You should combine these techniques as necessary to write paragraphs that hold together around a central theme or topic.

                In the following paragraphs, boldface print indicates some of the devices that lend coherence to the paragraph. Study them carefully to see those ideas that are developed, those words that tie previous information to new information being introduced, and how various thoughts are explained.

               Experience gained on the Santa Fe Trail was comparatively unimportant, and might be misleading. Conditions there were very different. The distance was only half as far, and the country was nearly all open and level. Even more important, as the expression “Santa Fe trade” indicates, that trail was used by traders, and not by emigrants. When the Oregon and California emigrants imitated the Santa Fe traders, they nearly always came to grief—as in using big wagons, forming large companies, and organizing in military fashion.

               On the other hand, the emigrants made use of a general backlog of experience with teams and wagons. Every farmer knew a good deal about that sort of thing, and he had probably made journeys of several hundred miles. What had to be faced, to get to California, were the new conditions—the tenfold-long pull, the untamed Indians, the lack of supply points, the difficult country of deserts and mountains. But in the handling of the wagon itself most of the men were already proficient, and this proficiency was essential to the success of the covered-wagon migration.

George R. Stewart

[In both paragraphs, a logical plan controls the arrangement of information. Each of the two paragraphs starts with a generalization. Supporting elements appear in ascending order of importance, the most dramatic statement in each paragraph appearing last. The pronouns they and he connect with nouns stated earlier, emigrants and farmer. Repetition of the word emigrants and the use of proficient and proficiency advance the flow of ideas by repeating important thoughts. Repetition is usually good in a paragraph when it expands on a thought previously mentioned; repetition is usually bad when it repeats a previous thought without adding anything new to it. Furthermore, the writer uses a series of gerund phrases as objects of prepositions, that is, at the end of the first paragraph. In the middle of the second paragraph, he uses a series of appositives to expand the thought expressed in the phrase the new conditions. (An appositive is a noun that follows another noun, adding information about the previous noun.) Finally, the use of the expressions even more important and on the other hand and the dramatic use of but to open a sentence act as transitions, carrying thought smoothly from one idea to another.]

                Coherence is a difficult matter. Sometimes you can obey all the formal rules and still have trouble developing a paragraph so that a reader can follow it easily without being bogged down in useless repetition or feeling that something has been left out. The main rule for coherence in paragraphs is to keep developing ideas by expanding on words or thoughts expressed in the first sentence and the succeeding sentences. Then be sure that all the sentences in the paragraph develop an idea that can be expressed in a summary sentence, whether you write that summary sentence into the paragraph or not.

                Here is a paragraph that demonstrates some simple truths about coherence: the introduction to an article about the first pilots to fly around the world nonstop, a flight that ended successfully on Christmas eve, 1986.

               What a grand Christmas gift it was—the “last first” in aviation, a nonstop flight around the world on the gossamer wings of one of the strangest-looking craft ever built. Voyager, made of paper, graphite and resin, was a cross between a glider and a graphite fishing rod, and it looked like the result of the mating of a seagull and a pterodactyl. The pilots were Dick Rutan, 48, a Vietnam War flying ace, and Jeana Yeager, 34, a gentle but steely Texan who never talks when she can be doing. Flying Voyager, said Yeager, was like riding on the back of an eagle.

Sam Moses

[The paragraph begins with an exclamation and a long phrase. The next sentence picks up the thought expressed in both the words “flight around the world” and “strangest-looking craft ever built.” The word Voyager gives the name of this strange craft; the sentence tells why it was strange. In the next sentence, the word “pilots” looks back to Voyager and to “craft.” Planes have pilots, and when we see the word “pilots,” we make the connection between it and the aircraft just described. The following sentence repeats both the name Voyager and the name of one of the pilots mentioned in the previous sentence, “Yeager,” and it tells something she said. All these sentences are tied together by the interconnections of these words. We could summarize the paragraph in a sentence like this: “A bizarre aircraft called Voyager, piloted by a man and a woman, successfully made the first nonstop flight around the world.” The development of one idea after the other is controlled by a central thought that binds all the other thoughts in the paragraph together.]

                Here are some devices that will help you achieve coherence in different kinds of paragraphs that you may write.

1                     Arrange paragraph ideas according to a logical plan.

How you organize information in a paragraph is related to your main point and what you want to say about it.

You can arrange information spatially by locating the reader somewhere in a scene and then moving through physical space—from back to front, from top to bottom, from left to right, or in some other logical way. In describing landscapes, paintings, buildings, streets, and various other things, you may choose to move your readers carefully across space.

You may learn to write paragraphs such as the one below by standing in front of the scene you want to describe and mentally blocking it off in sections. If you carry a notebook, you can jot down some things you see in each section.

Spatial Arrangement

               I walked out on the bridge and looked down at the lock. The canal flowed into the lock through a sprung wooden gate just under the bridge. It ran between two narrowly confining walls for about a hundred feet. Then, with a sudden boil and bubble, it broke against another gate, spilled through, and resumed its sluggish course. The walls of the lock were faced with big blocks of rust-red sandstone. Some of the stones were so huge that they could have been hoisted into place only with a block and tackle. It was beautiful stone, and it had been beautifully finished and fitted. Time had merely softened it. Here and there along the courses I could even make out the remains of a mason’s mark. One device was quite distinct—a double-headed arrow. Another appeared to be two overlapping equilateral triangles. I went on across the bridge to the house. The windows were shuttered and boarded up, and the door was locked. No matter. It was enough just to stand and look at it. It was a lovely house, as beautifully made as the lock, and as firmly designed for function. It gave me a pang to think that there had once been a time when even a lock tender could have so handsome a house. A phoebe called from a sweet-gum tree in the dooryard. Far away, somewhere down by the river, a mourning dove gave an answering sigh. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes after ten. I started up the towpath.

Berton Roueché

[We look down from the bridge into the canal at the bottom of the lock. Then we examine the walls of the lock. Looking at the house, we then move to a tree in the dooryard and after that to a place far away down by the river. The scene unfolds through logical movement in space.]

                Another way to present information in a paragraph is chronologically. In a chronological arrangement, events are organized as they happen, one after another. Earlier incidents come before later ones. We tell stories in the narrative mode.

Chronological Arrangement

               The sun rose slowly out of the hazy sea as we hiked through the great olive grove at the foot of Mount Iouktos on Crete. By seven o’clock, we had started our slow climb up the mountain, following a trail that twisted back and forth as it snaked its way toward the summit. We left the olive trees behind quickly and entered a rocky world where a few poplars cast an occasional weak shade. By ten o’clock, the sun had burned the haze off the sea, and its heat bore down on us. We quickly became thirsty, but we had brought no water. By eleven, we were drenched with sweat, and the heat made everything shimmer so that the tumbled rocks seemed to dance crazily in the harsh sunlight. By now we could see for miles down the island of Crete, and to the west the huge bulk of Mount Ida rose into the hot blue sky. By noon, nearly crazy with heat, thirst, and fatigue, we got to the top. There we found a little church, and just beside it was a cistern with a bucket attached to a long rope. We dropped the bucket down into the darkness of the cistern and heard a great, reassuring splash. Quickly we pulled the bucket to the top and drank greedily. Then we sat in the shade of the church and looked out over one of the most beautiful landscapes I had ever seen.

Dick Curry

[The writer’s intent here is to capture the experience as it happened, describing one event at a time. The description begins at the bottom of the mountain early in the day and ends at the top of the mountain around noon. The ascent of the climbers proceeds as the sun climbs in the sky and the heat increases hour by hour, and the story ends with the climb over.]

                Spatial and chronological arrangements often work together. In both of the sample paragraphs above, chronological and spatial order contribute to the coherence of the paragraph.

                You can arrange paragraph elements according to importance, starting with the least significant or least dramatic information and building to a climax with the most significant or most dramatic.

Order of Importance

               Shakespeare came to London at a fortunate time. If he had been born twenty years earlier, he would have arrived in London when underpaid hacks were turning out childish dramas about brown-paper dragons. If he had been born twenty years earlier, he would have arrived when the drama had begun to lose its hold on ordinary people and was succumbing to a kind of self-conscious cleverness. But his arrival in London coincided with a great wave of excitement and achievement in the theatre, and he rode with it to its crest. William Shakespeare brought great gifts to London, but the city was waiting with gifts of its own to offer him. The root of his genius was Shakespeare's own, but it was London that supplied him with the favoring weather.

Marchette Chute

[The fact that London, at the time he arrives, gave Shakespeare just the right environment for his talents is the most important fact in this paragraph, and it comes last.]

                Paragraphs may be arranged inductively or deductively. An inductive scheme builds through successive instances to support a generalization that comes at the end of a paragraph. In other words, the writer presents details one after the other and finally draws a conclusion from them. In a deductive arrangement, the generalization comes first, and the particular details succeed it in the paragraph.

Inductive Arrangement

               We huddled together in the cool spring night, whispering in hoarse voices, thrumming with the excitement that vibrated through the crowd gathering in the parking lot outside the Ames train station. All the way home from Des Moines we had hugged each other, laughed, cried, and hugged each other again. When we passed through the small farming towns between Des Moines and Ames, we rolled down the windows of the Harbingers’ station wagon and shouted down the quiet streets, “We beat Marshalltown in seven overtimes! We beat Marshalltown in seven overtimes!” It had a rhythmic beat, a chant we repeated to each other in unbelieving ecstasy. We beat Marshalltown in seven overtimes! For the first time in ten years, Ames High School had won the state basketball championship. Most of us sophomores felt nothing so important could ever happen to us again.

Susan Allen Toth

[The last sentence states the generalization that the paragraph details support.]

Deductive Arrangement

               Other scientific investigations also exerted considerable influence on present-day painters and sculptors. Inventions like the microscope and telescope, with their capacity to enlarge, isolate and probe, offer the artist provocative new worlds to explore. These instruments, which break up structures only to examine them more fully, demonstrate how details can be magnified and separated from the whole and operate as new experiences. Repeatedly, artists in recent years have exploited this idea, allowing one isolated symbol to represent an entire complex organism. Miró often needs merely part of a woman’s body to describe all women, or Léger, one magnified letter of the alphabet to conjure up the numberless printed words that daily bombard up.

Katherine Kuh

[Supporting details about scientific inventions and their effect on artists follow the generalization stated in the first sentence.]

Exercise 5. Explain the method of arrangement used in each paragraph below.

               Then a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.

Rachel Carson

               The preacher preached a wonderful rhythmical sermon, all moans and shouts and lonely cries and dire pictures of hell, and then he sang a song about the ninety and nine safe in the fold, but one little lamb was left out in the cold. Then he said: “Won’t you come? Won’t you come to Jesus? Young lambs, won’t you come?” And he held out his arms to all us young sinners there on the mourners’ bench. And the little girls cried. And some of them jumped up and went to Jesus right away. But most of us just sat there.

Langston Hughes

2                     Use pronouns to link ideas.

By replacing nouns, pronouns help achieve coherence, joining one part of a paragraph to another. Pronouns with antecedents refer the reader to a previously identified noun and help the writer to connect the ideas in a paragraph without having to mention the nouns again and again.

When you use pronouns, pay special attention to the antecedents. Readers must always find it easy to determine which words pronouns are referring to. When they are used well, pronouns fix attention on the ideas that help hold a paragraph together and make it coherent.

               When a mother is afraid that her child will die when it has only a pimple or a slight cold we speak of anxiety, but if she is afraid when the child has a serious illness we call her reaction fear. If someone is afraid whenever he stands on a height or when he has to discuss a topic he knows well, we call his reaction anxiety; if someone is afraid when he loses his way up in the mountains during a heavy thunderstorm we would speak of fear. Thus far we should have a simple and neat distinction; fear is a reaction that is proportionate to the danger one has to face, whereas anxiety is a disproportionate reaction to danger, or even a reaction to imaginary danger.

Karen Horney

[Each of the pronouns in boldface refers clearly to a noun or indefinite pronoun that comes before it. The pronouns give unity to the paragraph by focusing the sentences on the persons having the reactions described by the writer as “anxiety” and “fear.”]

3                     Repeat important words or phrases to connect ideas.

Repetition helps bind sentences together in a paragraph. By repeating key words you can help readers follow your line of thought. As we have said before, you want to make sure that every repetition includes some new information along with what is repeated. That information should develop some thought important to your essay.

               We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose do die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live; courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or in drift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our destiny is what ambition is about.

Joseph Epstein

[The boldface words choose and decide provide dramatic linkage of ideas, connecting thoughts smoothly while emphasizing the issue of choice and decision as the writer sees it. The new information provided in each repetition concerns what is open to choice and decision. The sense of choice is repeated again and again; what is chosen is different each time.]

4                     Use parallel structure to link ideas.

You can tie thought units together in your paragraphs by repeating the forms of clauses, phrases, or sentences. In the paragraph below, parallelism dramatically links Macaulay’s statements about Britain’s King Charles I (1600–1649), the only English king to be judged a criminal by his people and executed by beheading. Macaulay wrote two centuries after the event, at a time when some English romantic historians were defending King Charles. Macaulay wanted to set the record straight. He thought Charles was a rotten king, and here he gives his reasons, at the same time attacking Charles’s defenders.

               We charge him with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow! We accuse him of having given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of prelates; and the defense is, that he took his little son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the articles of the Petition of Rights, after having, for good and valuable consideration, promised to observe them; and we are informed that he was accustomed to hearing prayers at six o’clock in the morning! It is to such considerations as these, together with his Van Dyck dress, his handsome face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his popularity with the present generation.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

[The subject-verb-object structure opens each of the first three sentences: “We charge him,” “We accuse him,” “We censure him.” Also, a semicolon follows each attack on Charles and precedes each apology made by historians favorable to him. The grammar and syntax of the sentences heighten the contrast between Macaulay’s assertions and those of his opponents.]

                As Macaulay’s example points out, the use of extended parallelism in a paragraph works especially well in argument. Here is a more modern example, a paragraph from the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.

               We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly on tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

[The parallelism here lies in the repetition of the word “when,” followed by a clause depicting the humiliations of segregation as seen from the eyes of American blacks. The repetition of the word acts as a sort of hammer, beating home the judgment that segregation is evil. Note especially the parallel form represented in this opening clause: “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim. . . .”]

5                     Use appropriate transitional expressions to make your thoughts flow smoothly from sentence to sentence.

Transitional expressions are words or phrases that tell a reader something like this: “I am now leading you carefully from the point that I have just made to the point that I am about to make. Don’t let me lose you.” The most obvious transitional expressions are words such as moreover, furthermore, and, but, or, nevertheless, then, still, and likewise. These expressions look back to the thought just expressed and announce that readers will now move to a related but slightly different point.

               Many couples who want to adopt a child run into frustrating difficulties. They may have a comfortable home and financial security. And they may be loving and generous people. But they may be too old for the standards set by the adoption agency. Or they may discover that no children are available. Then, when a child is available, the couple may be charged an exorbitant fee. Nevertheless, couples who want to adopt a child usually persevere, and their determination usually pays off.

[In the boldface words in this paragraph, the word “and” helps add a thought. The words “but” and “or” indicate contrasts. The word “then” says that something happens after something else. “Nevertheless” contrasts previous ideas with one of the final ideas in the paragraph.]

transitional expressions

In the list below, transitional expressions are classified according to what they do in sentences. Choose transitional expressions to make the connections you want to make between your various ideas.

To show relations in space

above, adjacent to, against, alongside, around, at a distance from, at the, below, beside, beyond, encircling, far off, forward, from the, in front of, in the rear, inside, near the back, near the end, nearby, next to, on, over, surrounding, there, through the, to the left, to the right, up front

To show relations in time

afterward, at last, before, earlier, first, former, formerly, further, furthermore, immediately, in the first place, in the interval, in the meantime, in the next place, in the last, later on, latter, meanwhile, next, now, often, once, previously, second, simultaneously, sometime later, subsequently, suddenly, then, therefore, third, today, tomorrow, until now, when, years ago, yesterday

To show something added on to what has come before

again, also, and, and then, besides, further, furthermore, in addition, last, likewise, moreover, next, nor, too

To give examples or to intensify points

after all, as an example, certainly, for example, for instance, indeed, in fact, in truth, it is true, of course, specifically, that is

To show similarities

alike, in the same way, like, likewise, resembling, similarly

To show contrasts

after all, although, but, conversely, differ(s) from, difference, different, dissimilar, even though, granted, however, in contrast, in spite of, nevertheless, notwithstanding, on the contrary, on the other hand, otherwise, still, though, unlike, while this may be true, yet

To indicate cause and effect

accordingly, as a result, because, consequently, hence, since, then, therefore, thus

To conclude or summarize

finally, in brief, in conclusion, in other words, in short, in summary, that is, to summarize

                Well constructed paragraphs may hold together without obvious transitional words and phrases. You should not use such expressions unless you feel a special need for them. You can write sentences like the following and know that readers will assume that you are speaking of cause and effect.

I discovered that he lied to me about where he had been that night. I never trusted him again.

You do not have to say:

I discovered that he lied to me about where he had been that night. Accordingly, I never trusted him again.

You can assume that readers will recognize the cause-and-effect relation without your having to throw in the word accordingly. A good general rule to follow in writing holds that prose should be efficient. That is, you should generally delete words not necessary to the meaning you want to convey. Unless transitional words are necessary to express your meaning, you should not use them. Readers may mentally add words like for example, thus, however, and nevertheless as they read. Also, you have already seen how linking devices other than transitional expressions can work in your paragraphs.

                Even the punctuation in a sentence can serve as a connecting device. Notice how the dash and the colon in the two examples below link ideas without stating transitions directly.

Some penny-arcade war machines were also busy—the familiar American sound of the thump and whine of miniature electronic holocausts.

George Plimpton

[The dash acts as a transition here. Plimpton might have written “and thus I heard” or some other transitional phrase in place of the dash. But the dash does the job well enough without any special transitional phrase.]

The computer has had many effects on American life: used as a word processor, it has revolutionized the way people write; used to read bar codes on products bought in supermarkets, it has speeded up the checkout line; used in banks, it has reduced the number of checks people must write; used by credit-card companies, it has vastly speeded up billing procedures—and has sometimes enraged customers by billing them for the wrong amounts.

[Instead of using a colon, the writer of this paragraph could have said “for example.” But the colon indicates that what will come afterwards illustrates the sentence before the colon or else is caused by whatever is reported in the sentence before the colon.]

                The rule comes down to this: don’t use transitional expressions unless you must use them to be clear. How can you know if you should use them? You must read your writing carefully and see if it answers all the questions it needs to answer. Sometimes you must use transitional devices. But a steady repetition of moreover, furthermore, nevertheless, but, and so on can easily bore your readers. If you can develop your thoughts without using obvious transitional expressions, you are more likely to write in a lively and readable style.

Exercise 6. Rewrite the following paragraphs, putting in transitional devices where they are needed and taking them out where they are not needed. Compare your revisions with the revisions done by other members of your class. Be prepared to explain why you have removed a transitional device, why you have put one in, or why you have left one in the original paragraph.

A.           Writing is difficult for almost everybody, even professional writers. Specifically, writing requires hours of concentrated work. Furthermore, writers must usually withdraw from others while they are doing their writing. Moreover, writing exposes many writers to a constant sense of failure because they do not think they are doing well. Consequently, many writers stop writing at the peak of their careers. For example, Thomas Hardy thought that he wrote novels badly and stopped after writing some of the greatest novels in the English language. In the same way, Virginia Woolf fell into such despair about her work that she eventually committed suicide. Accordingly, we can see that both teachers and students who think that a writing course can make writing easy are perhaps pursuing a false hope. In other words, a writing course may make one’s writing better, but it may not make it easier to do.

B.           The house stood on a shady street in the suburbs. Surrounding it, the neighborhood was filled with similar houses. It was a comfortable place, large and square, with three floors and a basement and a broad covered porch across the front. In the rear, a large backyard allowed the family to picnic in warm weather. The backyard was surrounded by a pleasant wooden fence, too high for anyone to see over. Therefore, it was a private place, and people could sit there and talk or read or merely think without being disturbed. On the other hand, the house itself was old. As a result, the furnace needed replacing. Furthermore, the windows let in drafts of cold air in winter and, likewise, hot air in summer. Often people told us how much they like our house. And in truth, we liked it, too. But it was not an ideal place. Still, I am glad to have lived there growing up, and, notwithstanding its disadvantages, I miss it.

C.           Henry VIII remains the king of England best known to Americans. Of course, they do not like him very much. They remember the fate of his wives, especially those whom he had beheaded. Henry was hard on his friends, too. He often had them put to death when they did something that displeased him. For example, he had Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell beheaded, and, in addition, he had Robert Barnes, a former religious adviser of his, burned at the stake. Nevertheless, he gave England great benefits merely by surviving as long as he did because he kept his country from the civil war that might have broken out if he had died without an heir. Hence, it may be that he deserves some praise, although certainly no one can much admire his character.

6                     Link ideas together from one paragraph to the next.

In an essay, coherence between paragraphs is as important as coherence within paragraphs. Using the devices explained in previous sections, you can help your readers follow the direction of your thought as you move from one paragraph to the next in your writing.

The opening sentence of a paragraph in the body of an essay usually looks back to information in the previous paragraph and forward to information about to be disclosed. Boldface print in the excerpts below shows how that first sentence in a paragraph looks both backward and forward.

               When Africans first got to New York, or New Amsterdam as the Dutch called it, they lived in the farthest downtown portions of the city, near what is now called The Bowery. Later, they shifted, and were shifted, as their numbers grew, to the section known as Greenwich Village. The Civil War Draft Riots in 1863 accounted for the next move by New York’s growing Negro population.

               After this violence (a few million dollars’ worth of property was destroyed, and a Negro orphanage was burned to the ground) a great many Negroes moved across the river into Brooklyn…

LeRoi Jones

[The phrase after this violence connects the ideas of the two paragraphs. The phrase refers to the violence of the Civil War Draft Riots mentioned in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. The word after indicates something yet to come. Jones tells us then that “a great many Negroes moved across the river into Brooklyn.” That helps establish the topic of the next paragraph, which will be about the experience of blacks in Brooklyn. So the phrase after this violence looks backward to the previous paragraph and forward to the new paragraph that the phrase introduces.]

               Among those who now take a dim view of marijuana are Dr. Sidney Cohen, a drug expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, who once described marijuana as “a trivial weed,” and Dr. Robert L. DuPont, former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who had lobbied for marijuana’s legalization.

               According to these and other experts, it is no longer possible to say that marijuana is an innocuous drug with few if any health effects aside from intoxication.

Jane E. Brody

[The words according to these and other experts connect the paragraphs by referring readers to the point developed in the previous paragraph. The rest of the opening sentence of the second paragraph states the major point to be developed in that paragraph, i.e., the dangers of marijuana.]

This sort of connection signals a slight turn of the writer’s thought to develop an idea from one of the words in a previous paragraph. Such connections show the writer moving forward, adding new thoughts to earlier information, giving readers the sense that they have some reason to keep on reading.

In the body of an essay, the first sentence of a new paragraph usually provides the link to ideas in the preceding paragraph. Occasionally, however, the last sentence in a paragraph will point forward.

               Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don’t mean merely conscious; I mean wide awake.) In the second place, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. Let me develop these three points.

               If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. . . .

Mortimer J. Adler

[The sentence in boldface type at the end of the first paragraph announces Adler’s intention to explain some of the things he says in this paragraph about marking up books. He will develop these thoughts in the next paragraph. This sort of formal announcement aims at carrying readers smoothly from one part of an essay to another. It is sometimes used in scholarly writing where the material is dense and difficult to understand and writers want to be sure that they are taking readers along with them.]

In the following example, we have an entire paragraph used as a bridge leading from one part of a critical essay to another. Such paragraphs may serve to carry readers over material where they might otherwise be lost.

               I have, I hope, cleared the ground for a dispassionate comparison of certain aspects of Shakespeare’s technique in the Henry VI plays with his technique in the “romance” histories. Now, perhaps, some general remarks about the structure of the trilogy will be helpful.

Paul Dean

[This short paragraph joins two parts of an essay about the three plays Shakespeare wrote about the English king, Henry VI. The first sentence reminds readers of points made earlier about some of the dramatic techniques Shakespeare used in those plays. Now Dean, the author of the essay, announces a fairly major shift from that discussion to another, this one bearing on the structure of the three plays, called a trilogy.]

               There is an expression called “the peak experience,” a moment which, emotionally, can never again be equalled in your life. I had mine, that first day in the village of Juffure, in the back country in black West Africa.

Alex Haley

[This two-sentence paragraph provides a dramatic link for what is clearly a turning point in the essay. The device is especially useful when you think that the two parts of an essay are very different from each other and you want to be sure that the reader sees the connection.]

Exercise 7. Discuss the various devices used to build coherence within and between paragraphs in the following selection from Frances Fitzgerald’s article on a retirement community called Sun City near Tampa, Florida. Ask yourself these questions: What major theme joins all these paragraphs? What words carry the theme from one paragraph to the next? How do the last sentences in each paragraph look forward to the next paragraph? How do the first sentences in each paragraph look back to the last paragraph?

               The younger generation in this country has grown up with the notion that people should reach the age of sixty-five and reach it in good health. But Americans now over sixty belong to the first generation to do that. Modern medicine has increased longevity to some degree, but, just as important, it has alleviated some of the persistent, nonfatal maladies of the body. Throughout history, of course, some people have reached their eighties in excellent health, but until this century the majority of Europeans and Americans aged as many people still do in the poorest countries of the world¾suffering irreversible physical decay in their forties and fifties. Philippe Aries reminds us that until recently chronological age had very little meaning in European society; the word “old” was associated with the loss of teeth, eyesight, and so on. The very novelty of health and physical vigor in those past sixty-five is reflected in the current struggle over nomenclature. Since the passage of the Social Security Act, in 1935, demographers have used the age of sixty-five as a benchmark and labeled those at or over it as “the old” or “the elderly.” The terms are meant to be objective, but because of their connotations they have proved unacceptable to those designated by them. Sensitive to their audience, gerontologists and government agencies have substituted “older people,” “the aging,” or “senior citizens.” These terms, being relative, could apply to anyone of almost any age, but, by a kind of linguistic somersault, they have come to denote a precise chronological category.

               People now over sixty-five live on a frontier also in the sense that the territory is fast filling up behind them. By the end of the century, if current demographic trends hold, one in eight Americans, or slightly more than 12 percent of the population, will be sixty-five or over. The increase will at first be relatively small, because the number of children born in the thirties was a relatively small one; but then, barring catastrophe or large-scale immigration, the numbers will start to climb. In the years between 2020 and 2030, after the baby-boom generation reaches its seniority, some fifty-five million Americans, or nearly 20 percent of the projected population, will be sixty-five or over. How the society will support these people is a problem that Americans are just beginning to think about. Politicians have been considering the implications for Social Security and federal retirement benefits, but they have not yet begun to imagine all the consequences in other realms.

               The younger generation assumes that at sixty-five people leave their jobs and spend five, ten, or fifteen years of their lives in a condition called retirement. But there, too, the generation now around sixty-five has broken new ground. Historically speaking, the very notion of retirement—on a mass scale at any rate—is new, and dates only from the industrial revolution, from the time when a majority of workers (and not just a few professionals) became replaceable parts in organizations outside the family. The possibility of retirement for large numbers of people depended, of course, on the establishment of adequate social-insurance systems, and these were not created until long after the building of industry. In this country, whose industrial evolution lagged behind that of Western Europe, the possibility came only with the New Deal. The Social Security Act of 1935 created an economic floor for those who could not work. More important, it created the presumption that American workers had a right to retire—a right to live without working after the age of sixty-five. This presumption led, in turn, to the establishment of government, corporate, and union pension plans that allowed workers to retire without a disastrous loss of income. But these pension plans did not cover many people until some time after World War II. Even in 1950, 46 percent of all American men sixty-five and over were still working or looking for work. In 1980, only 20 percent were.

Frances Fitzgerald

c              Put enough details in your paragraphs to develop and support your controlling idea.

Paragraphs are usually weak when they contain nothing but general statements.

               The parking problem here at school is terrible. It sometimes takes hours and hours to find a space. Why can’t the administration do something about it? Students are late to class because they can’t find a parking space, and then they miss things in the lecture, and they do poorly on their final exams. With all the money the university is spending on football, you would think that they could put a little of it into student parking. It’s especially hard on commuter students.

Compare that general paragraph with this one, which is much more specific:

               On Friday of last week, I drove to school, arriving at 09:45 for a ten o’clock class. A parking sticker that cost me $250 for the year announces from the windshield of my car that I have the right to park in any student parking lot. But on Friday, I drove around parking lot A, parking lot B, and parking lot C without finding a space. Finally, in desperation, I drove up to parking lot M a mile away from my class. There, I found plenty of parking, but by the time I raced to the Mahan Building, where my accounting class was in progress, it was 10:20, and Professor Lewis stopped his lecture as I came in and said, “Well, we are certainly happy that Mr. Jenkins has decided to join us this morning. I hope you didn’t disturb your sleep just to be with us, Mr. Jenkins.” I felt my face turn hot, and I knew I was blushing from anger and embarrassment. I should have come earlier and parked in lot M at the beginning. But my own problem did lead me on a greater quest that is the subject of this essay. What is the nature of the parking problem here, and what can be done about it?

[The author of the first paragraph blows off steam but does not provide any worthwhile information. The author of the second paragraph tells us a story and provides many specific details that help us imagine the scene.]

1                     When you can, use concrete details to support the main idea of your paragraph.

Sensory details support paragraphs well—mention of colors, actions, sounds, and sensations of taste, touch, and smell. More specific details are nearly always better than general details. Rather than make a series of generalizations about the parking problem at your school, it is much better to tell a story that illustrates the problem. Rather than say “The room was shabbily furnished,” say, “Three old wooden kitchen chairs, a broken-down couch with a filthy cover, and a deeply stained folding card table were the only furniture in the room.”

Sensory language appeals to that part of the imagination that helps us join our experience to the experience of the writer. We have experienced a word like furniture only as an abstraction. It does not call up much of anything specific in our minds. But we have seen old wooden kitchen chairs, and mention of these words helps us imagine the scene better because we can bring concrete memories to it.

Sensory language, an essential quality of fiction, also adds life, clarity, and vividness to nonfiction prose, as you can see from this excerpt from Ida’s Fields, by Susan Hand Shetterly:

The day our fire department burned Ida’s house, smoke carried from the rotted timbers and cracked linoleum and old cedar shakes. Ida was dead, and the house with its caved-in kitchen floor and ruined roof on that long stretch of empty road was considered a hazard by the town selectmen. We could smell the fire from our place and see smoke through the trees. By nightfall, bulldozers had pushed the charred rubble into the cellar hole and covered everything Ida had owned with a clean layer of dirt. Everything, that is, but her fields.

               While she was alive, Ida did not let anyone walk those fields. It was rumored that if she caught you on them—and she was vigilant—she’d be looking at you down the barrel of a 12-gauge. She wore a nylon wig that looked like a brush fire flaming out of control, and beneath it, her face was a sour pucker. She died at ninety-three. That last year, she lived in one room of the house and spent her days perched like a caged bird at the window that looked out on the lovely roll of the fields.

               I have walked them at least a hundred times since her death. It is one field, actually, folded into five parts. At the fold lines, streams sing out in a January thaw. In the spring, they flood. But by August, they have vanished. As the field drops south towards the road, a line of granite breaks through it, as sharp as the vertebrae on the spine of a large, old animal. Ten apple trees grow on either side.

Susan Hand Shetterly

[Think of the difference in effect if Shetterly had written this: “For safety reasons the fire department burned down the empty house of an old woman who had died, and since then I have been walking around her place.” Her skill lies in noticing details and then calling them up to support her writing.]

Statistics and cases are the language of facts and figures. You can often use them effectively to support a topic. Statistics are numerical data; cases are specific instances involving real people and events. When you can use statistics well, they give authority to your statements and make readers think that you know what you are talking about. Then they will take your writing seriously. Statistics can often help your interpretation of a situation. Notice in the following selection how the numbers in the first paragraph and the dramatic use of a case in the second help the writer make his point that although many American Indian children leave the reservation to attend public schools, some tribes feel a strong need to preserve their traditional schools on their reservations.

               In 1969 there were 178,476 Indian students, ages five to eighteen, enrolled in public, Federal, private and mission schools. Approximately 12,000 children of this age group were not in school. Of the total in school, 119,000 were in public schools, 36,263 in boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 16,100 in Bureau day schools, 108 in Bureau hospital schools, and 4,089 in dormitories maintained by the Bureau for children attending public schools. The Bureau operated 77 boarding schools, 144 day schools, 2 hospital schools, and 18 dormitories. The number of Indian children being educated in public schools has steadily increased, aided by the financial assistance under the Johnson-O’Malley Act of 1934 (which provided financial support, in cooperation with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, to aid federally affected areas). The closer relationship between state school systems and the Indian system has been welcomed by many Indian groups. Sixty-one tribes have established compulsory education regulations that conform with those of the states where they live.

               On the other hand, some more traditional Indian groups have rebelled at the efforts to close down reservation schools. The attempt of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to close down, on July 1, 1968, a small grade-school at Tama, Iowa, created an instant reaction. Forty-five Mesquakie Indian children were attending school there on the reservation purchased by their ancestors, a separate body of the Sac tribe which, with the Fox, had a hundred years earlier been pushed out of Iowa into Kansas. The Mesquakie Indians, who had not been consulted about the closing of the school, promptly sought judicial relief. They got it in September 1968, in the Federal District Court at Cedar Rapids, when United States District Court Judge Edward J. McManus ordered the school reopened in the fall. The Mesquakie were able to call upon a number of influential white friends in their attempt to retain their Indian school. The validity of integration into a white school system that is often both distant from and cold toward Indian values can be questioned, as the Mesquakie questioned it.

Wilcomb E. Washburn

Using statistics like these requires a great deal of research and hard work. But if you are going to make meaningful generalizations about large groups of people, you must find the statistical information to support those generalizations, especially if the generalizations are central to the point you are making in your essay.

Always try to think of specific examples to support your generalizations. Even when you are writing about your personal experience, readers want to know why you think the way you do, why you make the general statements that you make, and why you look on the world as you do. You can help them by telling them incidents that have formed your opinions.

It was almost a third of a century since Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried, yet the ghost of their trial still seemed to haunt the courthouse. Scarcely a day passed while I was on jury duty but some reference to it came up. It shadowed us all. We served in the same paneled room with the marble-faced clock where Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried and sentenced. There was the same enclosure for the prisoners that Sacco-Vanzetti partisans referred to as a “cage”—as if the two defendants had been exhibited like animals in a zoo. Actually, it was a waist-high metal lattice, slightly higher in the back, with nothing formidable or forbidding about it. Our white-haired sheriff, Samuel Capen, in his blue-serge cutaway, its gleaming brass buttons embossed with the state seal, and his white staff of office that he wielded like a benevolent shepherd, had been sheriff at the time of the great trial. In the overlong lunch hours he would sometimes talk about it, telling of the day Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced, how Vanzetti made his famous speech, and how Judge Thayer sat with his head bent and never looked at him. I don’t suppose any doubts had ever crossed the sheriff’s mind as to the guilt of the two Italians or the rectitude of Massachusetts justice.

Francis Russell

[In this paragraph, in a chapter describing his early interest in the famous murder trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1920, Russell reports some of his experiences on jury duty in Dedham, Massachusetts, in the same courthouse where Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried and sentenced to death.]

                As you develop paragraphs in an essay, you will draw upon many devices to support your points. Like Francis Russell, you may give some concrete details that evoke a mood or recapture a scene. Not every point that you make in a paragraph can or should be supported by concrete details. Especially in a long essay, a paragraph may build a series of generalizations or abstractions without providing supporting data. But every good writer knows that effective writing uses details. Details remind readers of their own experiences. They allow readers to bring their own imaginations to what they are reading. Without them, readers remain vague about what the writer is trying to say, and if they do understand, they may not be convinced.

Exercise 8. Read the following selections and identify the details that support the controlling idea of each paragraph.

               When I first saw a water shrew swimming, I was most struck by the thing which I ought to have expected but did not; at the moment of diving, the little black and white beast appears to be made of silver. Like the plumage of ducks and grebes, but quite unlike the fur of most water mammals, such as seals, otters, beaver or coypus, the fur of the water shrew remains absolutely dry under water; that is to say, it retains a thick layer of air while the animal is below the surface. In the other mammals mentioned above, it is only the short, woolly undercoat that remains dry, the superficial hair tips becoming wet, wherefore the animal looks its natural color when underwater and is superficially wet when it emerges. I was already aware of the peculiar qualities of the waterproof fur of the shrew, and, had I given it a thought, I should have known that it would look, under water, exactly like the air-retaining fur on the underside of a water beetle or on the abdomen of a water spider. Nevertheless the wonderful, transparent silver coat of the shrew was, to me, one of those delicious surprises that nature has in store for her admirers.

Konrad Z. Lorenz

               We can understand though how the poet got his reputation as a kind of licensed liar. The word poet itself means liar in some languages, and the words we use in literary criticism—fable, fiction, myth—have all come to mean something we can’t believe. Some parents in Victorian times wouldn’t let their children read novels because they weren’t “true.” But not many reasonable people today would deny that the poet is entitled to change whatever he likes when he uses a theme from history or real life. The reason why was explained long ago by Aristotle. The historian makes specific and particular statements, such as: “The battle of Hastings was fought in 1066.” Consequently he’s judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says—either there was such a battle or there wasn’t, and if there was he’s got the date either right or wrong. But the poet, Aristotle says, never makes any real statements at all, certainly no particular or specific ones. The poet’s job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the typical meaning, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event. You wouldn’t go to Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland—you go to it to learn what a man feels like after he’s gained a kingdom and lost his soul. When you meet such a character as Micawber in Dickens, you don’t feel that there must have been a man Dickens knew who was exactly like this: you feel that there’s a bit of Micawber in almost everybody you know, including yourself. Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and remain for most of us loose and disorganized. But we constantly find things in literature that suddenly co-ordinate and bring into focus a great many such impressions, and this is part of what Aristotle means by the typical or universal human event.

Northrop Frye

2                     Choose an appropriate form to develop your paragraphs.

No book can list every possible kind of paragraph, but the following examples offer several varieties for study and imitation.

                Narration

                Use narrative paragraphs to tell a story in chronological order, relating the events one after the other as they happened in time.

               Banyan Street was the route Lucille Miller took home from the twenty-four-hour Mayfair Market on the night of October 7, 1964, a night when the moon was dark and the wind was blowing and she was out of milk, and Banyan Street was where, at about 12:20 a.m., her 1964 Volkswagen came to a sudden stop, caught fire, and began to burn. For an hour and fifteen minutes, Lucille Miller ran up and down Banyan Street calling for help, but no cars passed and no help came. At three o’clock that morning, when the fire had been but out and the California Highway Patrol officers were completing their report, Lucille Miller was still sobbing and incoherent, for her husband had been asleep in the Volkswagen. “What will I tell the children, when there’s nothing left, nothing left in the casket,” she cried to the friend who called to comfort her. “How can I tell them there’s nothing left?”

Joan Didion

[Covering a brief span of time, this narrative relates events in a clear sequence. Notice the use of detail that makes readers form pictures in their minds of what happened.]

                Process Analysis

                Use process analysis in paragraphs to explain how to do something or how to make something. Here is a paragraph, on how to check the inflation on your bike tires if you don’t have an air pressure gauge with you:

               There’s a great curb-edge test you can do to make sure your tires are inflated just right. Rest the wheel on the edge of a curb or stair, so the bike sticks out into the street or path, perpendicular to the curb or stair edge. Get the wheel so you can push down on it at about 45 degree angle from above the bike. Push hard on the handlebars or seat, depending on which wheel you’re testing. The curb should flare the tire a bit but shouldn’t push right through the tire and clunk against the rim. You want the tire to have a little give when you ride over chuckholes and rocks, in other words, but you don’t want it so soft that you bottom out. If you are a hot-shot who wants tires so hard that they don’t have any give, you’ll have to stick to riding on clean-swept Velodrome tracks, or watch very carefully for little sharp objects on the road. Or you’ll have to get used to that sudden riding-on-the-rim feeling that follows the blowout of an overblown tire.

Tom Cuthbertson

[You can follow these directions because they break down a process into simple steps that follow one after the other. In all process writing, you must break the process down into steps and list the steps one after another exactly as they follow in the process itself; by all means, do not leave any of the steps out.]

                Comparison

                Organize paragraphs by using comparisons that may include both similarities and differences. You may make comparisons between conditions existing at two or more different times or between people, places, or things existing at the same time. But be sure that your comparisons are sensible. You can compare any two things with each other—a freight train with a short story, for example. Both have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But such meaningless and trivial comparisons will annoy your readers. Annoyed readers usually stop reading.

                The following paragraph compares a Russian tank, T-34 of 1942, with earlier Russian tanks and also with the German tank that the Russians encountered in World War II. Because the comparison involves weapons of two armies at war with each other, it is clearly a meaningful comparison.

               The new T-34s coming into action in 1942 had better guns and engines. And they retained the broad tracks that made them more mobile and more weatherworthy than German vehicles. In mud or snow they could—quite literally—run rings around the panzers. The turret of the earlier T-34 had been difficult to operate, and its large hatch was vulnerable to grenades and satchel charges; the hatch had been replaced by a smaller opening for the commander and a second one for the gunner. The rear overhang over the turret—a favorite place for the German tank-killer squads to plant their mines—was eliminated, and handrails were welded onto the rear deck so that infantrymen could be carried to counter enemy antitank teams.

John Shaw

[Notice especially the careful detail that this comparison involves.]

                Classification

                Use classification in paragraphs to sort out things or people into groups of similar individuals. Often you will want to divide a large group into several smaller parts so that readers can see different elements in a group that, at first glance, may seem to be without variation.

                Classification helps organize complicated information so that it can be managed in steps by the writer.

               People who understand high finance are of two kinds: those who have vast fortunes of their own and those who have nothing at all. To an actual millionaire a million pounds is something real and comprehensible. To the applied mathematician and the lecturer in economics (assuming both to be practically starving) a million pounds is at least as real as a thousand, they having never possessed either sum. But the world is full of people who fall between these two categories, knowing nothing of millions but well accustomed to think in thousands, and it is of these that finance committees are mostly composed. The result is a phenomenon that has often been observed but never yet investigated. It might be termed the Law of Triviality. Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

C. Northcote Parkinson

[Parkinson, in a humorous way, classifies people’s sense of money into two sorts. This classification allows him to describe each sense of money and to come to a conclusion that explains why finance committees spend so much time arguing over relatively minor matters in the budget.]

                Causal Analysis

                Organize paragraphs around an explanation of cause and effect when you want to explain why something happened or when you want to explain the effects of some happening. Here are two paragraphs that give the cause and effect of the plague called the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century:

               In October 1347, a fleet of Genoese merchant ships from the Orient arrived at the harbor of Messina in northeast Sicily. All aboard the ship were dead or dying of a ghastly disease. The harbor masters tried to quarantine the fleet, but the source of the pestilence was borne by rats, not men, and these were quick to scurry ashore. Within six months, half of the population of the region around Messina had fled their homes or succumbed to the disease. Four years later, between one-quarter and one-half of the population of Europe was dead.

               The Black Death, or plague, that devastated Europe in the 14th century was caused by bacteria that live in the digestive tract of fleas, and in particular the fleas of rats. But at that time, the disease seemed arbitrary and capricious, and to strike from nowhere. One commentator wrote: “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another, for the plague seemed to strike through breath and sight.” The pestilence was widely held to be a scourge sent by God to chasten a sinful people.

Chet Raymo

[The writer of these paragraphs carefully spells out the cause of the Black Death and gives some of its effects in the Europe of its time.]

                Definition

                Use paragraphs to define objects, concepts, ideas, terms, political movements, and anything else that may be important to your essay. A useful definition first identifies something as a member of a class of similar things; then it states how it differs from everything else in its class. Simple, concrete objects may often be identified in a single sentence if they require definition at all.

               A typewriter is a small tabletop machine—operated by a keyboard activated by human fingers—that allows a writer to produce writing on paper more quickly and more legibly than by handwriting.

[Here a typewriter is first classified as a small tabletop machine. What distinguishes it from a copier, a stapler, a table saw or whatever is that it is operated by a keyboard activated by human fingers and that its purpose is to allow a writer to produce writing on paper more quickly and more legibly than by handwriting.]

                Definitions of more abstract terms may require an entire paragraph or several paragraphs. Paragraphs that define usually come near the beginning of an essay so that writers may be sure their readers understand a term to be used throughout.

               We have a roster of diseases which medicine calls “idiopathic,” meaning that we do not know what causes them. The list is much shorter than it used to be; a century ago, common infections like typhus fever and tuberculous meningitis were classed as idiopathic illnesses. Originally, when it first came into the language of medicine, the term had a different, highly theoretical meaning. It was assumed that most human diseases were intrinsic, due to inbuilt failures of one sort or another, things gone wrong with various internal humors. The word “idiopathic” was intended to mean, literally, a disease having its own origin, a primary disease without any external cause. The list of such disorders has become progressively shorter as medical science has advanced, especially within this century, and the meaning of the term has lost its doctrinal flavor; we use “idiopathic” now to indicate simply that the cause of a particular disease is unknown. Very likely, before we are finished with medical science, and with luck, we will have found that all varieties of disease are the result of one or another sort of meddling, and there will be no more idiopathic illness.

Lewis Thomas

[A paragraph like this one defines a term much more subtly and in much greater complexity than does either a common dictionary definition or the brief definition of a typewriter that we saw above.]

                Writers frequently combine patterns. The paragraphs by Chet Raymo and Lewis Thomas, for example, use narrative to help develop cause and effect and definition. The paragraph by C. Northcote Parkinson involves causal analysis as well as classification. When you write an essay, you should not feel obligated to use only one method of development in each paragraph. But your paragraphs will be more coherent if you decide which method of development should be most important in that paragraph for your purposes.

Exercise 9. Discuss the various techniques used in the following paragraphs—narrative, process analysis, comparison, classification, cause and effect, or definition.

               The figure that comes to me oftenest, out of the shadows of that vanished time, is that of Brown of the steamer Pennsylvania—the man referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault-hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart. No matter how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch below, and no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft, my soul became lead in my body the moment I approached the pilot-house.

               I still remember the first time I ever entered the presence of that man. The boat had backed out from St. Louis and was “straightening down.” I ascended to the pilot-house in high feather, and very proud to be semi-officially a member of the executive family of so fast and famous a boat. Brown was at the wheel. I paused in the middle of the room, all fixed to make my bow, but Brown did not look around. I thought he took a furtive glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but as not even this notice was repeated, I judged I had been mistaken. By this time he was picking his way among some dangerous “breaks” abreast the woodyards; therefore it would not be proper to interrupt him; so I stepped softly to the high bench and took a seat.

Mark Twain

               Exactly what happens when GNP [gross national product] falls or lags? The pace of business activity slows down. There is less demand for consumer goods and services, less demand for plant and equipment and other business items. Some businesses fire people; other businesses hire fewer new workers. Because our labor force is steadily growing as our population swells, even a small decrease in the willingness to take on new workers spells a sharp rise in unemployment for certain groups, such as young people. When a recession really deepens, as in 1980, it is not just the young who cannot find work, but experienced workers find themselves thrown out of work.

Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow

               In December of 1862, Benjamin Butler was replaced in New Orleans by General Nathaniel Banks—who was immediately offered a bribe of $100,000 to approve a shady deal. A disillusioned Banks wrote his wife that “everybody connected with the government has been employed in stealing.” He commented sadly: “I never despaired of my country until I came here.”

               Banks was by no means the only one who despaired of what he witnessed in the free-spending wartime years. The New York Herald coined a new epithet—“shoddy”—to describe the whole era. Originally, the word referred to a flimsy material used by profiteering contractors to make Army uniforms that were so poor they tended to disintegrate in the rain. “The world has seen its iron age, its silver age, its golden age and its brazen age,” pronounced the Herald. “This is the age of shoddy.” It was characterized by “shoddy brokers in Wall Street, or shoddy manufacturers of shoddy goods, or shoddy contractors for shoddy articles.” On Sundays, concluded the Herald, these men became “shoddy Christians.”

Dale Jackson and the editors of Time-Life Books

               People react strongly and variously to being queued. Russians line themselves up without being told. Moscow theater audiences file out, last row first, like school children marching out of assemblies. In America, on the contrary, theatrical performances break up like the Arctic ice in springtime. Commuters and the constitutionally impatient gather themselves for a dash up the aisle, while the rest of the audience is still applauding. Fidgeters and people who can’t bear having anyone ahead of them sidle across rows to emergency exits, while placid souls who seem to enjoy the presence of others drift happily up the aisle with the crowd. In Moscow, the theater is emptied faster. In New York, you can get out fast if you’re willing to work at it.

Caroline Bird

Exercise 10. Discuss what paragraph form you would use to develop these topics. Choose from narration, process analysis, comparison, classification, causal analysis, and definition.

1.       The meaning of intelligence

2.       An embarrassing or humorous moment

3.       Types of teachers

4.       How to repair a flat tire

5.       American democracy and ancient Greek democracy

6.       Why teenagers drop out of school

Exercise 11. Use the topics below to practice writing paragraphs according to the method listed by each number.

1.       Narration: (a) a fishing trip, (b) what you did last Saturday morning, (c) a time you were lost, (d) your first dance

2.       Process analysis: (a) cooking a simple recipe, (b) operating a food processor, (c) how to study for an exam, (d) throwing a curve ball, (e) learning to type

3.       Comparison: (a) a novel and a film based on the novel, (b) a pet dog and a pet cat, (c) two college courses, (d) downhill skiing and cross-country skiing, (e) rowing and canoeing, (f) German war aims in 1914 and in 1939

4.       Classification: (a) jobs for college students, (b) clothing styles for different sorts of people, (c) kinds of television watchers, (d) planets in the Solar system, (e) fantastic movies and police movies

5.       Causal analysis: (a) some effects of nuclear war, (b) why some children have trouble learning to write, (c) why more women are smoking cigarettes, (d) how high unemployment rates affect teenagers

6.       Definition: (a) democracy, (b) fascism, (c) religion, (d) women’s rights, (e) rock music, (f) jazz, (g) country music, (h) spectator sports, (i) a fan

3                     Write paragraphs of appropriate length.

There are no absolute rules for the length of a paragraph. Writers for newspapers and magazines often favor short paragraphs of a few sentences, totaling one hundred words or so. Many professional essayists prefer paragraphs that fill a half page or a full page of print. As you look back through the sample paragraphs in this chapter, you can see many different lengths.

A new paragraph signals a change of subject—slight or large—so a paragraph should be long enough to let readers absorb and remember its subject. Introductory paragraphs are generally shorter than paragraphs in the body of an essay. Within the body of your essay, it is a good idea to strike a balance between short and long paragraphs.

A good general rule is to have an indentation on each typed page. But use your judgment to decide how long your paragraphs should be.

d              Construct opening and closing paragraphs that suit your thesis and hold your readers’ attention.

Your opening paragraph should announce the general topic of your essay and be interesting enough to make people want to read on; the opening paragraph usually implies a promise you make to the reader to do something in your essay. Your concluding paragraph should end with that promise kept.

1                     Write opening paragraphs that seize the attention of readers as you introduce your subject.

Your opening paragraphs must win over readers trying to decide whether to read your work. Your opening paragraphs set the tone for everything else in your essay, announcing not only your subject but also the sort of audience you want to read your work.

A few audiences may expect your opening paragraphs to outline everything you intend to do in your essay. Descriptions of scientific experiments almost always start with such an outline, called an abstract in scientific circles. But if you are writing about some personal topic or about something you wish to explain or report, your first paragraphs usually give only an inviting glimpse of what lies in store for the reader.

Note how the opening paragraphs that follow introduce a subject and set the tone for the piece.

               It is a modern plague: the first great pandemic of the second half of the 20th century. The flat, clinical-sounding name given to the disease by epidemiologists—acquired immune deficiency syndrome—has been shortened to the chilling acronym AIDS. First described in 1981, AIDS is probably the result of a new infection of human beings that began in central Africa, perhaps as recently as the 1950’s. From there it probably spread to the Caribbean and then to the U.S. and Europe. By now as many as two million people in the U.S. may be infected. In the endemic areas of Africa and the Caribbean the situation is much worse. Indeed, in some areas it may be too late to prevent a disturbingly high number of people from dying.

Robert C. Gallo

[This paragraphs seizes a reader’s attention by relating some shocking information. It sets a tone of serious concern combined with careful objectivity about the facts.]

               Spring is a glorious time to be in Kansas Flint Hills, especially if the rains have been plentiful. The bluestem grasses have lost their winter gray and brown in favor of a deep rich green, a color that will soon fade with the coming of the hot summer sun. Even if spring is brief, as it is in some years, it is sufficient. The clean sweet smells carried on the gentle warm breeze blowing up from the southwest carry a freshness that the nostrils have not sensed since the Indian summer days of fall. “The hills,” as the local cattlemen call the land, have none of the flaming beauty of the forested New England mountains or the majesty of the Rocky Mountains. Rather, the gentle contour of the rolling carpet of grass stretching from horizon to horizon is soft and restfully inviting. It is peaceful because the hand of man is little in evidence. Most of the Flint Hills are still virgin prairie, much as they were a century or more ago when the Indian’s cattle—buffalo—grazed on the tall grasses. Today the white man’s cattle have replaced the shaggy monsters of the past.

David Dary

[This is the opening paragraph of a book called Cowboy Culture, an account of how cowboys lived on the western plains in the nineteenth century. Here is a carefully written and beautiful description that leads rather slowly into the theme of cattle raising, which itself introduces the main theme of the book, the story of the men who raised the cattle and took them to market.]

               I spent several days and nights in mid-September with my ailing pig, and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had slept up with a pig.

E. B. White

[This paragraph introduces a personal-experience narrative. It sets a tone of sadness and lets readers know that the essay will be about the death of a pig—an unusual subject but one that may interest them because it has so moved the writer.]

                In the following introduction, the writer tells readers just what to expect in the essay to come. Introductory paragraphs that summarize the essay to follow are especially popular among science writers. They assume a previous interest by the specialists who will read those essays. Those interested in the topic can quickly see the argument of the essay and decide if they want to keep reading.

               In this piece of writing I shall consider several educational issues growing out of A. R. Jensen’s essay, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” (Jensen, 1969.) The first deals with the question of how education should adjust to the incontestable fact that approximately half the children in our schools are and always will be below average in IQ. Following this, I take up some of the more moot points of the “Jensen controversy”—what does heritability tell us about teachability? What are the prospects for reducing the spread of individual differences in intelligence? And what are the educational implications of possible hereditary differences in intelligence associated with social class and race?—ending with some implications that these issues have for educational research.

Carl Bereiter

[Note that most writers cannot assume the professional interest on the part of readers that Bereiter assumes here. That is why blueprint beginnings are common in professional journals in medicine and science and in other publications where readers are seeking technical information. In most other writing, readers must be wooed into reading an essay. To win them over, writers must use more imaginative techniques than the so-called blueprint beginning that gives the plan of the essay in the first paragraph. The blueprint says “I am going to tell you about the World Series. I am going to tell you about the first game, the second game, and about all the other games until I get to the seventh game. I’m going to tell you a lot of interesting things about the players and coaches, and I’m going to describe many of the plays that happened on the field.” Blueprint beginnings usually signal a boring style.]

2                     Write concluding paragraphs that complete your essay without summarizing it.

If you write a scientific, technical, or academic essay, you may be expected to summarize everything you have said at the end of the essay. But there are far more imaginative ways to conclude an essay. Most professional writers make it a rule never to end a story or an essay with a summary.

A good concluding paragraph will complete the essay logically and clearly, perhaps drawing a conclusion that expresses some meaning to be found in the information presented in the essay. The following paragraphs express the general meaning of the essays they conclude.

               Does this terrible tale have a moral? Yes. In the past two decades one of the fondest boasts of medical science has been the conquest of infectious disease, at least in the wealthy countries of the industrialized world. The advent of retroviruses with the capacity to cause extraordinarily complex and devastating disease has exposed that claim for what it was: hubris. Nature is never truly conquered. The human retroviruses and their intricate interrelation with the human cell are but one example of that fact. Indeed, perhaps conquest is the wrong metaphor to describe our relation to nature, which not only surrounds but in the deepest sense also constitutes our being.

Robert C. Gallo

[This paragraph, the last in the article introduced by the paragraph beginning “It is a modern plague” in d-1, sums up the general lesson that may be learned from the study of AIDS, the lesson that human beings will never fully make nature do what they want it to do. Hubris, the destructive pride that makes us imagine we are more powerful than we are, may make us think that we have conquered nature. But AIDS and the retrovirus that causes it show that nature can always surprise us. Notice that the first paragraph speaks of AIDS; this last paragraph also refers to the disease.]

               As the sixteenth century was ending, the ranching industry was firmly established in the New World. It had spread northward on two fronts, one up the western and one up the eastern slope of the majestic Sierra Madre. It had swept more than a thousand miles from where it began southwest of Mexico City less than a century before. And the vaquero had become an integral part of the spreading cattle-related culture that emphasized the mounted horseman.

David Dary

[This paragraph concludes the chapter begun by the introductory paragraph you read in d-1. Notice that just as the first paragraph speaks of cattle, so does the last, in the phrase “cattle-related culture.” The last sentence speaks of the vaquero, the Spanish word for “cowboy,” and the chapter itself has discussed the development of cattle ranching on the plains by the first white settlers, who were Spanish.]

               The news of the death of my pig traveled fast and far, and I received many expressions of sympathy from friends and neighbors, for no one took the event lightly, and the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly to its calendar, a sorrow in which it feels fully involved. I have written this account in penitence and in grief, as a man who failed to raise his pig, and to explain my deviation from the classic course of so many raised pigs. The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it, singly and together, in seasons of reflection and despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing.

E. B. White

[The death of the pig mentioned in the first paragraph of White’s article (d-1) is mentioned again in this last paragraph. He concludes with a mention of the grave—something we might expect when the essay has been about a death.]

e              Revise any loose paragraphs for unity, coherence, and development.

As you revise the rough draft of your essay, make sure that your paragraphs are unified, coherent, and well developed. You may want to add elements, eliminate elements, or subordinate one element to another. Because the controlling idea of your paragraph should guide any changes you make, start by rereading your paragraph carefully to determine the controlling idea that you want to express. A paragraph like the one that follows requires revision in an essay.

Loose Paragraph

               Wood-burning stoves are helping many Americans beat the cost of fossil fuels and save money. Wood is still plentiful in the United States. Many states set off parts of their state forests where residents can cut designated trees at no charge. Some wood stoves give off emissions that may cause cancer. But the technology of wood stoves has improved so that they can be very safe as well as efficient. The federal government now has standards that wood stove manufacturers must meet. Unfortunately, wood stoves are sometimes bulky and ugly and take up too much space in small rooms. Sometimes they make rooms too hot. Many homeowners who have gone to wood stoves for heat report savings of hundreds of dollars each year over the former price of heating their houses with oil. And many of them enjoy the exercise of cutting wood.

[In this paragraph, the controlling idea is clearly stated in the first sentence. Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the idea that wood stoves save money. The issues of availability and safety, though important, do not suit the topic of this paragraph. In the same way, the sentences about the disadvantages of wood stoves have no place in a paragraph about costs. The sentence about the technology of wood stoves may belong in a paragraph about costs because technology has made wood stoves more efficient, that is, cheaper to operate. Smoother connections between sentences would make the chapter more coherent, and the paragraph would benefit from added details about the availability of wood and about the efficiency of wood stoves.]

Here the paragraph has been revised with the above points in mind.

Revised Paragraph

               Wood-burning stoves are helping many Americans beat the high costs of fossil fuels. In recent years, the prices of oil and gas have come down, but these are limited fuels, and the prices are bound to rise again. So the availability of cheap fuel is still worth considering—and wood is cheap in some parts of the United States. A cord of wood, a stack measuring 4 x 4 x 8 feet, costs just over a hundred dollars in a typical heating season. Many states like Massachusetts and Montana set off parts of their state forests where residents can cut designated trees at no charge. On a warm summer morning, one may see dozens of families sawing trees and loading vans or pickup trucks with logs for use as a winter fuel. Not only can wood be obtained cheaply, but also the technology of wood stoves has improved; the new models are far more efficient than the old ones. Now a family can heat a house with a wood stove with a minimum of waste or expense. A good airtight wood stove heats a room far more efficiently than does a conventional fireplace or a Franklin stove. Many homeowners who have turned to wood stoves for heat report savings of hundreds of dollars each year over the price of heating their houses with oil.

Dick Curry

[All sentences now support the idea of saving money with wood-burning stoves. The writer has added details: he names two states that make forests available for wood users, and he provides a lively image to imply the popularity of such programs. An example about efficiency adds substance to the paragraph, too. Transitional expressions connect ideas smoothly.]

bibliography

1.       Dr. Marius Richard, Dr. Wiener Harvey S., College Handbook, Second Edition—McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1988

2.       Dr. Fowler H. Ramsey, The Little, Brown Handbook, Third Edition—Boston, Little, Brown & Company, Inc., 1986

3.       Neufeldt V., Guralnik David B., Webster's New World Dictionary—New York, Prentice Hall, 1991

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[1] Famous park in the heart of New York City.

[2] Victimized by his own indulgences and influenced by the mental breakdowns of his wife as well as by the failures of his writing, Fitzgerald became a compulsive drinker.

[3] Fort Knox is the site of U.S. gold bullion depository.

[4] Eton, town in Buckinghamshire, on the Thames, near London: pop. 5,000: site of a private preparatory school for boys (Eton College)

[5] fille de joie [Fr. daughter of joy] a prostitute þ (pl.) filles de joie-prostitutes

[6] The word sic (Latin for “in this manner”) in brackets indicates that an error in the quotation appeared in the original and was not made by you.

[7] Bible the place where the last, decisive battle between the forces of good and evil is to be fought before Judgment Day: Revelation 16:16

[8] Alcott, (Amos) Bronson (1799–1888); U.S. philosopher and educational reformer

[9] Tennyson, Alfred 1^st Baron Tennyson 1809–1892; English poet: poet laureate (1850–1892): called Alfred, Lord Tennyson

[10] Her experimentation included the so-called stream of consciousness which means a narrative technique whereby the thoughts, percepts, etc. of one or more of the characters of a novel, short story, etc. are recorded.

[11] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. actually professes non-violence in the struggle for freedom and equality for blacks in America.