Reviewing my students’ theses, and talking with them about their writing processes, they always tell me that they find crafting and constructing paragraphs very challenging. This is not unusual. Sentences and paragraphs form the core of our writing and each of them is, for many of us, beautiful and unique. Therefore, it is important that we develop strategies and heuristics to write those sentences and craft those paragraphs.
I wrote a Twitter thread that forms the basis for this post, showcasing several frameworks to build paragraphs.
I had intended to write this thread a while ago but reading this article by Anindita Sarkar really cemented in me the importance of showing how to write good paragraphs.
The paragraph I highlighted has a central idea: to understand water access you need a gendered lens. pic.twitter.com/7oBOgRGCGT
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
Articles and book chapters that are rich with theoretical constructs and powerful ideas are usually too important for me to skim or to just do a quick AIC content extraction, so I really engage with them in depth.
Note how Sarkar starts with her first idea and then carefully provides scaffolding for her argument – explaining the characteristics of social spaces, the gendered nature of water fetching, and thusly, the importance of understanding lived experiences of women in accessing water. pic.twitter.com/6KuOlJhNsu
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
THESE types of articles that require very, very deep engagement and thought are the ones that I not only highlight, scribble on, and digitally capture in my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) but I also write notes in my Everything Notebook https://t.co/RUBqHvOBPd
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
The more I read and write about academic writing, the more I realize that for me, the paragraph is the key unit of analysis in academic writing.
With my students, I tell them to create paper outlines by using either Triggering Questions (questions that trigger their memory/or make them want to answer them) or “Topic Sentences” https://t.co/1zaznh4Zse
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
As I discuss below, I use the process of constructing paragraphs as a framework to think about how I plan my writing and research time, and how I set my work-related goals.
I find that using small goals for my writing sessions (125 words, 15 minutes, 3 sentences, 2 paragraphs) helps me feel less stressed about the overall writing project. I am finishing up 4 book manuscripts, you can imagine how stressed I feel. https://t.co/Aedss19GxQ
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
As I always do, I look for other scholars’ strategies to help guide my readers. This approach allows them to decide if using MY techniques suits them or if another academic’s strategy works better for them. Below are a few links to some members of my community of scholars who write about academic writing, people I respect a lot.
2) @ThomsonPat offers the MEAL approach to writing paragraphs
– Main Idea
– Evidence
– Analysis
– Link back – link forward https://t.co/X6Sk9a8FtA— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
I find some of the rules of paragraph writing that you get in classes somewhat idiosyncratic. For example, I do apply some of these to my writing and that of my students:
– say no to 2-sentences’ paragraphs (3-7 is readable, >9 becomes almost impossible to clearly comprehend )
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
I have, in fact, read Hayot’s Elements of Academic Style https://t.co/rLMFi5MqDj
But I found different insights, and to be quite frank, I am not sold on the inverted U.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
CONSIDERING STRUCTURE AND CONTENT OF A PARAGRAPH
Now, which other models do we have to help us craft paragraphs? I think this is where the whole “rhetorical moves” elements of academic writing is useful.
We need to consider two components:
1) the STRUCTURE of the paragraph
and
2) the CONTENT of the paragraph.
You can use any of the models I have mentioned before (Cayley, Thomson, Pacheco-Vega, Hayot, Dunleavy) to structure your paragraph. And THEN to fill up the paragraph you need to provide content organized in a sequence that provides evidence, argument, etc. That is, make it “argumentative”.
Or you can use the Toulmin style of argumentation https://t.co/EYwHm7Usu3.
Or you can use the Graf & Birkenstein “They Say/I Say” set of templates to develop your argument https://t.co/yDXHawbez1
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 11, 2020
You may want to test the above mentioned strategies to STRUCTURE and then provide CONTENT for your paragraph. As for my work-planning strategy, in the end, my writing target goal is always A PARAGRAPH. Nothing more because otherwise I get stressed.
In this post, I’ve provided a few different strategies to STRUCTURE and develop the argument that will form the CONTENT of your paragraph. Hopefully my readers will find this approach will be useful.
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