Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.
-Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages”
I’m a fan of what, in radio
station parlance, is called classic rock. That musical category, I
guess, can be fairly open, depending on where you draw your
classical line, but for me it means rock and roll from the late 60s
through the 70s: the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin,
the Doors, with the obligatory shot of Peter Frampton every now and
again. That’s the music I most often listen to when I drive, and my
radio buttons are preset to the classic stations. They have been
since high school, when I realized how much better it was to take
to the road with Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” on the speakers.
Having listened to a lot of
classic rock stations over the years, I also recognize that many of
them share similar promotions or on-air bits. For instance, more
than one station I know has a “Get the Led Out” show, with non-stop
Zeppelin (one guy in Akron actually locked himself in the studio
one weekend and refused to come out until he had played all their
albums). Or, another popular bit is to have a “classic cut”
weekend, where the station will play lesser-heard songs, say “Salt
of the Earth” from the Stones, or “Everyday” from Derek and the
Dominoes. These songs don’t have as much airtime as “Brown Sugar”
or “Layla,” so it’s a matter of digging them out from under the
standard playlist. Usually, stations like to incorporate the sound
effect of someone trudging down a long flight of stairs and opening
a creaky door before playing such cuts. One or two say they are
bringing up songs “from the vault.”
I love hearing those classic
cuts. They remind me of how deep some albums are and I’m often
prompted to rush home (driving the speed limit, of course) and dig
out an album and re-listen. True, Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” is a
good song, as is “Levon,” but I hear them so often on the radio
that I’m not tempted to pick up Madman Across the Water.
But, when I hear “Rotten Peaches” or “Razor Face,” I get tempted to
put the record on—even now, just typing that up, I had to go and
put in the CD.
What I’d like to do here this
semester is something similar: provide some classic cuts from the
WordWorks vault. This broadsheet has been around since
January of 1986 and there are a lot of excellent songs in our back
catalogue. Many of them are accessible
online,
but there are several dozen that are not. Because the articles
often revolve around similar topics (responding to student writing,
creating assignments, grammar), they remain relevant to our
teaching today. Like the best old songs, these articles can prompt
us to re-listen—to hear again an assignment idea we liked and could
try again, to hear again how we might incorporate more peer
response in class, to hear again a way to talk to students about
paragraphs or sentences. Who knows, they might even have us singing
along in our offices, re-listening to our own writing processes. So
we’re going to, as the stations say, flashback to a classic cut.
Before this month’s cut,
though, I do want to announce a couple of things (kind of like a
public service announcement on the radio, if we want to keep with
this analogy). First, the Writing Center is sponsoring a series of
writing workshops this semester. Six of them are being held in
cooperation with the Gateway Center: see our workshop
webpage
for more information. Two other workshops are specifically for
graduate students—one on sentence style and patterns and a second
on plagiarism. For information on those, please click
here.
Now, on to our classic cut.
This month’s article is from December 1989 and it focuses on the
paragraph. Rick Leahy was lead writer/guitarist, and, as usual,
none of the material in Word Works is copyrighted, so if you
find something you would like to use, feel free to print or
download, or to create a link to us. . . program your radio buttons
accordingly.
mm
Word Works #32:
December 1989
“Let Us Now
Consider the Paragraph”
Rick Leahy
Most readers and writers take
paragraphs for granted. Ordinarily we pay as little attention to
them as to commas or periods — which is as it should be, for a
paragraph space or indentation is essentially a punctuation mark.
But when we are responding to student writing, or revising our own
writing, the paragraph can be surprisingly useful.
In the past hundred years and
more, the attention given to paragraphs may have done more harm
than good. The prevailing theory, perpetuated in textbooks right
down to some of this year's crop, was that a paragraph was a
miniature essay. The topic sentence was like a thesis statement,
usually appearing at the beginning but sometimes elsewhere. Even if
absent, the topic sentence was clearly implied. The rest of the
paragraph developed the topic sentence just as the paragraphs of an
essay develop a thesis.
It is no surprise that the
inventor of this notion of the paragraph was a logician, the
Scotsman Alexander Bain whose 1866 work, English Composition and
Rhetoric, was enormously influential. Bain's followers refined
his ideas and condensed his six characteristics of a good paragraph
down to three: Unity, Coherence, and Emphasis. This triumvirate has
dominated the teaching of paragraphs until recently, when more
realistic approaches have begun to appear.
Many of us probably remember
doing paragraph exercises in school: deductive, inductive,
comparison/contrast, narrative, and so forth, each one a little
essay that received a little grade that went down in the
instructor's record book. Textbooks routinely presented sections
called "Achieving Unity," "Achieving Coherence," and "Achieving
Emphasis," each with so many hints and rules no one could possibly
learn them all. Some whole textbooks and courses were built on the
premise that, before students could write good essays, they must
first master paragraphs, and before they could write good
paragraphs they must first master sentences.
It all seemed to make sense,
particularly because the textbook authors chose paragraphs that did
indeed conform to the patterns they wanted to illustrate. But in
reality writers do not think in terms of individual sentences or
paragraphs; they think in terms of the whole piece they are trying
to create. Writers do not stop and think, "Let's see, the next
paragraph is going to say this, so it will have to be deductive, or
possibly a combination of deduction and comparison/contrast. Yes,
that's what I think I'll do" –no writer really does that, with the
possible exception of the authors of those textbooks, and even that
is doubtful.
This does not imply that
students shouldn't be asked to write a paragraph now and then, it
can be done in almost any class as a quick exercise to explore an
interesting problem. That is different from "teaching paragraphs"
in a writing class.
The traditional view of
paragraphs was secretly held suspect by a great many English
teachers for a long time, but it was first widely called into
question in the 1970's. The best-known early study was Richard
Braddock's 1974 article, "The Frequency and Placement of Topic
Sentences in Expository Prose." Braddock studied 420 essays
randomly chosen from The Atlantic, Harper's, The New Yorker, The
Reporter, and The Saturday Review. ( Incidentally, these
magazines have traditionally been a major source of essays
published in freshman English anthologies.) He found that only 55%
of the paragraphs in these essays had any discernible topic
sentence in any form, even implied. Only 13% began with topic
sentences, despite the repeated claim in most writing textbooks
that nearly all paragraphs begin with topic sentences. Braddock
acknowledged that the paragraphs in his study would often have been
easier to read if they did have topic sentences, but his figures
spoke clearly about the real practices of professional writers and
editors.
Further questions about the
traditional teaching of paragraphs were raised in 1976 by Arthur A.
Stern, in his article, "When Is a Paragraph?" Over a few semesters,
Stern gave the students in one of his classes a passage from Brooks
and Warren's Fundamentals of Good Writing. The passage was
an exact copy of the original, except that all the paragraph
divisions had been removed. Stern asked the students to decide how
many paragraphs the passage should be divided into and where the
divisions should fall. Some divided it into two paragraphs, others,
into three, four, or five. They discussed their decisions and
agreed that all the divisions made sense. Only five out of 100
students divided the paragraphs exactly as Brooks and Warren had.
Stern was quick to admit that the result of the experiment was far
from remarkable —except that all the students were English
teachers.
Stern further pointed out that
paragraph divisions change with fashion, that a hundred years ago
writers left chunks of their text in large paragraphs, whereas
writers today would tend to break the same text up into a number of
shorter paragraphs. Stern also maintained
As every
experienced writer knows, paragraphing helps establish a tone or
"voice." ( Editors
know this,
too. That is why they frequently reparagraph a writer's
prose to bring it into
conformity
with their publication's image.) Short paragraphs appear to move
more swiftly than
long ones,
short paragraphs lighten up the appearance of a page, whereas long
ones, containing
the identical
information, give the page a heavier, more scholarly look. Just as
he adjusts his
sentences and
his diction, the writer may adjust his paragraphs, deliberately
or intuitively, to
achieve a
variety of rhetorical effects — formality or informality,
abruptness or suavity,
emphasis or
subjunction.
The modern paragraph, Stern
concluded, "is not a logical unit and we should stop telling our
students it is." The old rules and formulas did not work; other
ways would have to be sought for teaching paragraphs.
Of those who have tried to find
new approaches, one of the most interesting is Ann Berthoff, in
Forming/Thinking/Writing (1982). Berthoff suggests that we
think of the paragraph as working the way a hand works. The hand is
a gatherer, and it takes different shapes depending on whether it
is picking up a couple of eggs, measuring out sticks of spaghetti,
or scooping up water. The paragraphs too is a gatherer, and it
changes shape according to its subject matter and the writer’s
rhetorical purpose.
Instead of looking at
paragraphs in isolation, which Bain’s successors tended to do,
Berthoff sees them as intermediary between the sentence and the
whole composition. We have to think of a paragraph as saying
something in and of itself, but also as doing something for
the piece as a whole. As readers we must be aware, at least
intuitively, of where a paragraph is in the whole gathering of
paragraphs, how it carries forward or changes what goes before it,
how it prepares the way for what comes next.
Kenneth Bruffee (A Short
Course in Writing, 1985 ) has taken this double view of the
paragraph — seeing what it does as well as what it says—to suggest
a way we can use paragraphs to get a handle on revising our own
writing. Bruffee has devised a system that a writer can either use
alone or with a group. He suggests attaching a blank sheet of paper
beside each page of draft (or, even better, printing out the draft
in a column on the right half of the page ). Then each paragraph is
glossed twice, with "This paragraph does . . ." and "This paragraph
says . . ." The "does" gloss may describe a number of things: what
the paragraphs is about, how it relates to the paragraphs around
it, how it does its job (e.g. by comparison, example etc.). The
"says" gloss is a summary of the main idea of the paragraph. If
there is a topic sentence, the gloss will be a copy of it. That may
sound unnecessary, but when the glossing is all done, it is
possible to read down the column of glosses and see how the
composition is put together as if by x-ray. There is probably no
better way to find holes, inconsistencies, and misplaced parts in a
piece of writing.
Attending to paragraphs can
also give us a strategy for understanding the writing of
our students and responding to it. After we have reached the
twenty-fifth or fortieth in a stack of student papers, our minds
begin to blur from fatigue. There is probably no way to prevent
this entirely but reading for paragraphs can help. One should read
quickly, so as not to get bogged down. Scanning from paragraph to
paragraph is a helpful way to see where the writing is going, how
much it really has to say, and how it is put together. The reader
can take advantage of the fact that almost all writers have enough
intuitive sense of paragraphing to gather their sentences into
bundles that belong together. If the writer has violated that sense
by loading too many topics in one paragraph, or by cutting a
paragraph off before it can finish out its idea, the problem will
easy to spot.
In responding to paragraphs
with problems, it usually does not help the writer to say, "Where
is your topic sentence?" or "where is your evidence?” Responses
like these emphasize form over content, as if paragraphs were
little pre-formed boxes into which blocks of writing labeled "topic
sentence" and "evidence" can be fitted. The writer is likely to
feel he has violated some obscure rule of the game, whereas he has
simply not yet made his meaning clear or has not gathered sentences
in a way that helps the reader understand. It is more helpful to
focus on the confusion the problem creates: “I don’t understand
what you’re saying in this paragraph,” or “I need to know how this
paragraph follows the one before it,” or “This paragraph puzzles
me; it seems to be about two different topics that need to be
treated separately.” Such comments prompt the writer to look at
content. Once she clarifies the content, the form usually clears up
at the same time.
Paragraph continue to withstand
easy definitions, but fortunately they are much easier to write
than the traditional textbooks would have us believe, and they can
be among our handiest tools for critiquing and revising.