Organization & Structure

PART III of III

Transitions: The Bridges of the Essay

Transitions are like bridges between your ideas. An essay without clear transitions is like a series of isolated islands; the reader will struggle to get from one point to the next. Good transition statements straddle the distances between paragraphs. They help to make connections in the reader's mind.

The most critical transition in your essay is the one into the final paragraph of your essay. Readers must clearly see how you arrive at your conclusion—or final idea. They want to know that the evidence or ideas you presented in the preceding paragraphs point inextricably to the conclusion you ultimately reach. If this flow is disrupted at any level—sentence, paragraph, or essay—you run the risk of turning off or confusing your readers.

Conclusions: Leaving a Lasting Impression

Your conclusion is your last chance to leave a lasting impression on your readers. Here are some tips about conclusions:
Make sure your conclusion relates to your main point. The end has to be true of the beginning, so don’t introduce a new topic in the conclusion.
Hearken back to the introduction in your conclusion. For example, if you started with an anecdote, consider ending with a different part of the story.
End gracefully. The conclusion should complete the points you’ve developed over the course of your essay. Restating every single one of your points is unnecessary and cumbersome.

Organization & Structure

PART II of III

The Overall Structure of the Essay

Just as every paragraph should contain a topic sentence, every essay should contain a single, powerful, engaging thesis statement. And just as every sentence within a paragraph supports the that paragraph’s topic sentence, every paragraph in an essay must support the thesis statement.
A thesis statement is the main idea of your paper. It does two things: 1) it explains your topic and 2) it reveals your attitude toward it.

Developing a working thesis should be among your first priorities. "Working" is the operative word here; your thesis may change through the research and writing process, but it is imperative to start with a definite plan in mind. Think of your working thesis as an hypothesis that may, and probably will, undergo changes along the way.

Once you hone in on your essay’s main thesis statement, you need to decide how to organize and structure the material of your essay. Structure does not need to be dry, boring, or academic.
There are many interesting ways to structure your essay. Following are descriptions and examples of some of the basic ways of organizing your thoughts for a logical, well-ordered presentation to your readers.

Organizing and Developing Paragraphs
You can organize the paragraphs of your essay by using any of the following schemes:
· Enumeration: Follow an ordered pattern of one, two, three, etc.
· Chronology: Use time to organize an event or tell a story or describe how a process unfolds.
· Space: In descriptions, start at the top and move to the bottom, or move from left to right, inside to outside, and so on.
· General to specific or abstract to concrete: Paragraphs are easier to understand when the general statement comes first and the supporting examples, evidence, or illustrations follow.
· Order of importance: You can either begin with the most important point or you can end with it, but decide on the importance of each point within the paragraph and order your paragraphs accordingly. Remember, you want your readers to follow you to your final destination.

You can develop each paragraph by using any of these options:
· Examples, illustrations, or testimony: These clarify your meaning and help your readers connect to what you are saying in a concrete way.
· Data: Facts and statistics are an excellent way to support or illustrate your point.
· Use the rhetorical modes to develop a topic within a paragraph:
o Narration: Tell an interesting story about the topic to engage your readers’ interest.
o Comparison-Contrast: How is one topic similar or different to another?
o Definition: Provide a definition of a topic to help your readers understand what exactly you are writing about and what your major point is.
o Division and Classification: Fit your topic into a class with similar things if doing so helps to clarify it.
o Illustration: Reveal your topic through clear examples.
o Cause-Effect: What caused it to happen and what effects are the consequences?
o Argument and Persuasion: Convince your readers to think of a topic, idea, or stance in a different way by providing strong evidence of your belief.

Understanding Paragraph Clusters
Every essay can be broken down into groups of related paragraphs, called paragraph clusters. Consider this point when you notice your paragraphs may be getting too long. For example, one paragraph might cover every step in a process. But if you want to include more details in your description of the process, then each step might be better covered in a single paragraph. In describing a building, for example, the first paragraph might describe the height, the next, the materials that compose the building, and a third, the building’s location.

Organization & Structure

PART I OF III
All essays require structure. A solid structure gives organizational shape to your thoughts, arguments, or stories; structure serves to orient your readers and indicate the direction you’re going and how you plan to get to your final destination—that is, your conclusion. Structure demonstrates to your readers that you are being logical and well-ordered.

Structure is present at multiple levels in any good essay: Every sentence should have structure; every paragraph should have structure; every set of paragraphs should have structure; and every essay should have an overall structure or organization that encourages your readers to follow your lead, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, right to your conclusion.

Sentences: The Bricks and Mortar of the Essay

As a general rule, each sentence must have a subject (noun) and a verb (action word). Beyond that general rule, however, sentences may vary widely in word order, word choice, and length, depending on appropriateness, pace, and your individual writing style.

The main point to remember about sentences is that they are the foundation of every piece of writing, and that, individually, each sentence must make perfect sense to your readers. Misspellings, muddled grammar, or poor punctuation will only irritate or confuse your readers. So, each sentence you write must follow specific rules of proper English.

If your sentences are unclear, if they meander pointlessly from one idea to another or show no discernable concern for proper spelling, punctuation, or grammar, it’s a sure bet that your essay will be unclear, as well. That’s why, when you’re writing and especially when you’re revising your essay, you must take the time to make sure that the meaning of each sentence is crystal clear to your readers. Write so your readers cannot misunderstand or misconstrue what you are saying.


Paragraphs: The Pillars of the Essay

Paragraphs are the pillars of the essay—they uphold and support the essay’s overall structure. Each paragraph you write should express a single thought. Each paragraph you write should contain a beginning, middle, and end. Each paragraph you write should have a simple and direct structure.

To construct a solid paragraph:
>Include a topic sentence. A topic sentence, usually placed at the beginning of a paragraph, states the main idea being discussed in that particular paragraph.
>Establish unity. A paragraph is unified if each sentence supports the topic sentence. Unity comes from what you say.
>Establish coherence. Coherence requires that a paragraph is clear, logical, and readily obvious to the reader how each sentence supports the topic sentence. To establish coherence, think about transitions between sentences, not just when you begin a new paragraph. Here are some good ways to establish coherence within a paragraph:
>Use key words to tie your ideas together. Don’t use synonyms merely for variety’s sake; the same word repeated helps create coherence.
>Write a new sentence to expand upon or further develop the previous ones, connecting old information with new.
>Use transitions to connect ideas within a paragraph.

Example:
Good writing comes from hard work [TOPIC]. But [TRANSITION WORD] hard work [REPEATED KEY WORD AND OLD INFORMATION] never scared me. In fact [TRANSITION WORD], I relish the challenge of creating something new, no matter how difficult [KEY WORD] or time consuming [NEW INFORMATION]. I have spent weeks on a few pages, months on an essay, and years on a book [OLD INFORMATION: TIME].

Beginning a New Paragraph
There are no hard and fast rules for when to begin a new paragraph, but consider doing so at the following points:
· When beginning a new idea
· When breaking an idea down into its more descriptive parts
· In dialogue, when the speaker changes
· When summing up ideas (e.g., your conclusion)
· When a paragraph gets long and looks daunting (e.g., any paragraph containing more than 12 sentences)

Beginning and ending

Two periods in the writing process that often are given short shrift by teachers of writing skills and their students are:

• the critical planning stage leading up to the writing of a term paper.
• the important stage of polishing the final draft before handing in your term paper.

Here are two easy-to-follow schemes that should make writing a typical 10-page term paper a more manageable process and your final essay a higher quality result.

A Plan for Developing Your Work Schedule

Let's imagine that you've been given a due date of one month for your term paper. (Adjust the following schedule accordingly to accomodate shorter deadlines.) Starting with the due date, work backward chronologically. After you have set the deadlines listed below, you should set some intermediate goals to stay on track during the process.

__________ Due date to hand in your term paper.

__________ Start polishing your paper's final rough draft (3 days before due date).

__________ Complete first rough draft (1 week before due date).

__________ Begin first rough draft (2 weeks before due date).

__________ Draft your paper's thesis statement and rough outline based on your research

of a sharply focused topic (2 1/2 weeks before due date).

__________ Start researching your paper's topic, gradually refining and narrowing it down

(3 weeks before due date).

__________ Decide on your paper's general topic (3 1/2 weeks before due date).

A Checklist for Polishing Your Final Draft

__________ Does each sentence lead the reader clearly from one idea to the next?

__________ Does each paragraph efficiently lead the reader from one major point to the next?

__________ Is your first paragraph engaging and clear? Is the thesis stated clearly?

__________ Does your last paragaph restate the main points of your essay?

__________ Is your word choice appropriate and correct?

__________ Are all abbreviations clearly explained to the reader?

__________ Are all quotations in their proper form?

__________ Are all titles in your paper in the proper form?

__________ Is the grammar of each sentence correct?

__________ Has the essay been carefully proofread for spelling and punctuation errors?

__________ Have all citations been double-checked for their accuracy?

Last week's blog topics 6.27-7.03/2008

Parallel Sentence Structure (7.03.2008)

Easy Guide to Punctuation (6.30.2008)

Writing Unified Sentences (6.29.2008)

Why Grammar is Important (6.28.2008)

Getting Started (6.27.2008)

Welcome to the parallel universe

Parallelism--a word adopted from the field of of mathematics by teachers of writing--is an excellent principle to ensure correctness, clearness, and effectiveness of your sentences. When two or more ideas in a sentence are related and serve a similar purpose, they should be phrased in the same grammatical form. Many students have a hard time understanding parallel structure.

For example:

Unclear: She liked to sing and playing golf.
Clear: She liked to sing and to play golf. OR She liked singing and playing golf.

Unclear: What do rich suburban kids know about crime, those who are hungry, and poverty?
Clear: What do rich suburban kids know about crime, hunger, and poverty? OR What do rich suburban kids know about people who are hungry, poor, and victims of crime?

As you can see, faulty parallelism disrupts the balance of a sentence. It interrupts the sentence's smooth flow, causing the reader to momentarily hesitate as he or she tries to process the information and make sense of what you're attempting to express. So, always remember to use parallel elements to express parallel ideas. Balance nouns with nouns, prepositional phrases with prepositional phrases, main clauses with main clauses, and so forth.

Here are some examples:

Parallel words and phrases
Jackson is slow but thorough.
Life is both a mystery and an adventure.

Parallel clauses
My favorite things to do as a kid were playing video games, eating caramel popcorn, and going to soccer games.
Both at work and at home Alec's only thoughts were about making money and having fun.
I was panicked when I arrived late on campus and when I found that no statistics courses were available.
Professor Williams likes to read the Classics and to go hang-gliding.

Parallel sentences
Tom Thumb was one of the smallest people in the circus world. Andre the Giant Killer was one of the biggest people in the wrestling world.
The Hummer is one of the least fuel-efficient vehicles ever made. The Prius is one of the most fuel-efficient vehicles ever made.

Finally, for another example of parallel sentence structure, go back to the first sentence of this blog. Can you see how the words correctness, clearness, and effectiveness are parallel and how they make the sentence easier to comprehend? If you do, then you're starting to understand the the value of parallelism in the writing world.

Punctuate. Punctuate? Punctuate!

You might be surprised to learn that you're not the only one who has trouble with punctuation. Most of my students do.

Everyone knows that a period ends sentences that are not questions, such as:

It was a moonlit night.

However, some students make the mistake of putting a period at the end of a sentence that is a question, such as:

Was it a moonlit night?

Here is a quick reference guide to common punctuation marks.

PERIOD ( . ) -- ends sentences that are not questions.
It was time for me to leave.

QUESTION MARK (?) -- ends sentences that are questions.
Is it time to leave?

COMMA ( , ) --tells the reader to pause slightly, and it helps differentiate the parts of a sentence. The comma is by far the most misused punctuation mark, probably because it can be used in so many different situations. Use a comma in the following conditions:

Following an introductory phrase: After a week of record heat, the temperature dropped nearly to the freezing point.

To separate items in a series: I love Las Vegas for its sun, fun, and amazing desert landscapes.

Before a coordinating conjunction that connects two independent clauses: She believed he would ask her to go to the beach, and he did.

To set off nonrestrictive phrases (parenthetical phrases that add to a sentence but aren't absolutely necessary for the sentence to make sense.): The car, which I had bought from a crooked dealer, broke down so often I soon knew the bus schedule by heart.

To set off quotations contained within a sentence: "I don't like hip-hop," he pointed out, "so I don't like to go clubbing with them."
My boss said, "It's time to put the hammer down," so I made ten extra sales calls this afternoon.

To indicate direct address: "Joe, make sure your room is spotless."

To separate distinct adjectives in a series: The loud, constant, reverberating noise of the city makes me crazy.

In a date, between the day and year: On September 11, 2001, the world as we knew it changed forever.

To indicate the omission of verbs in parallel clauses: Abe loves the drums; Sally, the guitar; and Jo, the piano.

EXCLAMATION MARK ( ! ) -- to end declarative and imperative sentences with excitement or urgency. Show me the money!

COLON (:) -- introduces a list of things, a summary, or an important conclusion. The colon is used after an independent clause and does not come between a verb and its object.
I expect my students to do three things: listen, share, and learn.
Arturo learned one very important lesson: Never trust an ex-girlfriend's movie recommendation.

SEMICOLON (;) -- used to join related independent clauses in place of a conjunction (and, or, nor, but, etc.). Semicolons are also used to separate items in series that contain commas within single-item descriptions. Suki likes to make Chinese food; it is her passion.
He had a brand new Mac; an old desktop PC; and an ancient manual typewriter.

QUOTATION MARKS (" ") have many uses:
To represent text as speech: "I could have been a contender," he sadly admitted.
To indicate material taken from another source: The artist's work shows "the agony and the ecstasy" of the creative process.
To indicate titles of poems and short stories: The old man in Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is having a crisis of faith.
Please note: Periods and commas always go inside quotation marks in American English. Question marks, exclamation marks, semicolons, colons, and dashes go outside quotation marks unless they are part of the quotation. (This isn't true for written English in Great Britain.)

DASH (--) -- sets off a parenthetical phrase or draws attention to a final conclusion. The IPod--introduced only a few years ago--has become the most popular portable music player.
His hair, his eyes, his taste in clothes--they all are perfect.

APOSTROPHE ( ' ) -- used to indicate possession when combined with a noun. An apostrophe also signals that one or more letters have been left out in a contraction. Maureen's tomcat is one mean critter.
Where there's a will, there's a way.
I don't like vegetarian cooking.

HYPHEN (-) --joins linked words together, especially if they are used together as an adjective:
He never could kick his desire for fresh-made ice cream.

PARENTHESES ( ) -- used to set off a loosely related phrase: His new goal (conceived after he was fired for no good reason) was to start his own business.

SLASH (/) -- indicates multiple possibilities: Tell the teacher and/or the principal.

ELLIPSIS ( ... ) -- three periods separated by two spaces that mean some quoted material has been omitted, usually for brevity's sake: A great philosopher once wrote, "The Gods had condemned Sisyphus ... to become the futile laborer of the underworld."

BRACKETS ( [ ] ) -- indicate any word, punctuation, or formatting inserted into a quote but not present in the original source: "The racers have one mile [1.6 kilometers] to go before the finish line."

Sentence sense

The fundamental qualities of effective prose are unity, coherence, emphasis, and variety. What is true for the whole essay is also true for each sentence, as well as for each paragraph, of that essay. But it all starts at the sentence level. Unity and coherence in sentences help to make your ideas logical and clear. Emphasis makes them forceful. Variety gives them interest.

WRITE UNIFIED, LOGICAL SENTENCES
A sentence is unified when all its parts contribute to making one clear idea or impression. The parts of an ideal sentence form a perfect whole, so that a clause, a phrase, or even a word cannot be changed without disturbing the clarity of the thought or the focus of the impression. The next series of blogs will try to help you write unified, logical sentences, sentences that are not cluttered with obscurities, irrelevancies, or excessive details.

Bring into a sentence only related thoughts; for thoughts not closely related, use two or more sentences.

Make sure that the ideas in each sentence are related and that the relationship is immediately clear to the reader. Use two or more sentences to develop ideas that are too loosely linked to belong in the same sentence.

UNRELATED
Yesterday Keisha sprained her wrist, and she could not find her class notes anywhere.
RELATED
Accident-prone all day yesterday, Keisha not only sprained her wrist but also lost her class notes.
{The relationship of the two ideas is made clear by the addition of the opening phrase.}

To sharpen your sentence sense, try the following exercise. All the sentences below contain ideas that are apparently unrelated. Adding words when necessary, rewrite each of the sentences to indicate clearly a relationship between ideas. If you cannot establish a close relationship, put the ideas in separate sentences.

1. A police officer who patrols the streets at night can become a hero, and cowards can be found in any walk of life.

2. The fence and driveway need repairs, and why are property taxes so high?

3. I hate strong windstorms, and walnuts pelted my bedroom roof all night.

4. There are some great musicians playing at tonight's "Concert in the Park," but personally I prefer a quiet evening at home watching the TV show "Ugly Betty."

5. Andrew was advised to hire a tutor in English immediately, but the long hours of work at The Gap kept his grades low.

Why not try this exercise right now? Send me your sugggestions for making these sentences unified and coherent.

I'll be covering other topics that will help to sharpen your sentence sense in future blogs. Keep checking back.

Students' least favorite lessons

My goal as a teacher of writing skills is to ensure that what my students mean to say or write is what they actually say or write. Consider the misguided baker who loudly bragged:

"Try our hot pies. You'll never get better."

RULES? WHAT RULES?
Those of you who are younger than, say, thirty, missed out on one of the great gifts of modern education--grammar! Someone, somewhere, decided that schools should no longer teach grammar, but should, instead, allow children to "pick up" the rules from their exposure to different types of language. Since children learn to speak their language without formal training, why not let them learn the rules in the same way?

We do, in fact, learn the rules of grammar by being exposed to language. After all, we use grammar every time we speak or write. But what we can't learn, unless we are taught it, is the terminology to describe the structure of our language.

Why is it so important to learn the correct terminology? Well, for one thing, it's very difficult to know how to fix something in your writing when you don't recognise the terms used to explain either the problem or the solution. The best way to understand anything is to get to know it--and the best way to do that is to break it down into smaller pieces and to tackle each one in turn. Then, when you put those pieces back together again you'll find out how the whole system works. Simple--but not always easy.

VALUABLE LESSONS
The prospect of sitting through a class learning about the rules of language and grammatical structure is about as appetizing to most students as biting into one of those questionable pies produced by that misguided baker mentioned above. Trust me, though, these lessons are a very important step toward improving your writing skills.

Try to keep this advice in mind when I--or other teachers--announce that the topic of today's lesson is "grammatical structure" or "parts of speech." What you're about to learn may not rock your world, but it will certainly help make you a better writer.

Of fears & other obstacles

What do you feel when you first sit down in front of your computer to write an essay assignment? If you're like many of my other students you feel...the icy talons of FEAR tearing up and down your spine.

You stare at the blank screen and the blank screen stares right back at you. You have a lot of ideas rumbling around in your head. But you can't seem to put them in any order. Your fingers hover over the computer keyboard and you wonder where to begin.

It's no wonder that many of us, when confronted by a writing assignment, would rather check our email a dozen times, IM our best friends, surf the Net for the latest U-Tube video of Lindsay or Kevin or Shaggy or Britt, or see what's on the FaceBook site of an old boyfriend or girlfriend.

Anything but get started on the assignment.

DON'T FREEZE
It's completely natural to hesitate before you start writing. You have to take time to gather your thoughts, and sometimes that means just avoiding what you know you eventually have to do. But hesitation is one thing... total paralysis is something else!

My advice to my students is to start hitting those keys NOW. Confront that blank screen with anything that comes into your head--whether it's related to the assignment or not. At this stage, don't give a thought about proper spelling or punctuation or even syntax. Just get some words on the screen.

John Steinbeck, the American novelist and Nobel Prize winner, used to write a letter to his editor before starting on the day's work for his book, East of Eden. It was a way of loosening up... sort of like doing stretching exercises for the brain. Once he was warmed up, he started writing, his mind better able to cope with the rush of ideas.

It'll work the same way for you. Start writing. Really. Gradually, you'll work your way around to writing about the assignment--how much you hate it or don't want to do it or hate writing, period. But keep at it. Keep those fingers tapping. Soon, you may start putting down some preliminary thoughts on the assignment. Maybe you can settle on a topic or a way of introducing the materials or even how you'll organize the essay.

If a topic for your essay doesn't come immediately to mind, you might start surfing the Net. But this time you're not doing it to avoid work or waste time. Now you're doing it with a higher purpose in mind. Visit news and other sites--wherever you think you might find something of interest. If a topic hits you in the face, then you might go back to your document and start writing everything you could cover about that particular topic.

THE VALUE OF OUTLINING
Outlining is a great way to get started on a particular writing assignment. Just block out in your mind or on paper or on the computer what you plan on covering in your essay and in what order. You can play around with outlining for a long time, but it's time well spent. Once you've got an outline down, your essay may start becoming clearer to you. If not, then IM or call up a friend and kick around the topic a bit. Getting somebody else's perspective can be really useful. That's exactly what Writers' Workshops are all about.

Suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly), you will start feeling comfortable with the topic you've chosen. You may now have some insights into what you want to say. Maybe you even have a vague idea about how your thoughts and ideas about the topic will fit together. How one thought will lead logically to the next one. How one idea will flow into the next idea.

At this point you can keep inputting, or you may decide to create a new document on your computer to start your essay for real. Once the first draft of your essay is in front of you, you can then think about editing it--correcting spelling, using proper punctuation and syntax, etc. But leave that until after you've finished your first draft.

PRE-WRITING IS THE KEY
Was all that preliminary labor a waste of time? If you think hard about it, you will understand that doing some PRE-WRITING (which is what you did) helped you identify a topic you could write about, suggested an effective way to organize the material, and maybe even made you feel comfortable writing about it. It boosted your confidence. It got you going...

And, yes, it helped to vanquish that fear and loathing that you may have felt before you started.