Understanding Paragraphs
1. The sentence becomes the basic unit of a complete thought.
2. The paragraph represents a complete idea, a combination of sentences that
expresses a complete idea.
3. The report, dissertation, article represents a combination of paragraphs which
provide full development for the thesis statement.
The whole = the sum of its parts. Irrelevant information should be omitted.
Characteristics of Effective Paragraphs
1. The opening sentence, the topic sentence, summarizes the idea presented in the
paragraph.
2. Supporting sentences should develop the topic sentence.
3. Supporting sentences should occur in a logical order.
4. Effective paragraphs should not be excessively long in technical writing.
5. In the perfect paragraph, sentences can occur only in one order.
6. In a document, the sum of the topic sentences should equal the central idea you
want to convey.
Paragraphs for Study
Observation: To write effective paragraphs, you must (1) understand the structure of
paragraphs, (2) study effectively constructed paragraphs, and (3) apply what you have
learned to your own work.
Paragraph 1
Coal—The Alternative Energy Source
In Texaco’s view, coal gasification at present holds the greatest promise of any
of the synthetic fuel’s processes. Gasification of coal results in a clean-burning
product that can provide heat for many industrial applications. Most important, coal
exists in abundant supply: domestic reserves contain more energy than all the oil
already discovered in the Middle East and can meet America’s needs for the next 200
years. The problem hasn’t been lack of economic incentives to utilize coal. More
recently, environmental road blocks have slowed the transition from oil to gas.
This situation is changing. Texaco now has the capability to gasify coal in a
manner both economically and environmentally sound. The patented Texaco Coal
Gasification Process converts coal into synthetic gas, a mixture of hydrogen and
carbon monoxide. The gas is then cleansed of sulfur and other environmentally
undesirable content. In July 1989, Texaco and Southern California Edison entered
into an agreement for a demonstration project that used Texaco’s gasification process
to fuel an efficient gas-turbine combined cycle system capable of generating 100
megawatts of electricity. Early in 2000, the Electric Power Research Institute made a
major commitment to the project, and Texaco contacted private sector investors to
participate in subsequent phases.
Paragraph 2
Ship-noises surrounded him as he ate. Every time the Lydia rolled and pitched
a trifle as she reached the crest of the swell which was lifting her, the woodwork all
creaked gently in unison. Overhead came the sound of Gerard’s shod feet as he
paced the quarterdeck, and sometimes the pattering of boney bare feet as some
member of the crew trotted by. From the forward came a monotonous steady
clanking as the pumps were put to the daily task of pumping out the ship. But these
noises were all transient and interrupted; one sound went on all the time so steadily
that the ear grew accustomed to it and only noticed it when the attention was
specially directed to it—the sound of the breeze in the innumerable ropes of the
rigging. It was just the overtones, but it would be heard in every part of the ship,
transmitted from the chains through the timbers along with the slow, periodic
creaking.
Paragraph 3
Understanding Grain Growth in High Purity Niobium May Improve
Manufacturability and Reduce Cost of MRI Machines
Health care costs increase by technology which involves costs for both research and for
manufacturing . Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment provides a major
diagnostic tool but also a major cost for diagnosis. Thus, finding ways to reduce
manufacturing costs of MRI machines is vital to reducing their cost. This paper explains an
initial research effort to examine a way to reduce the cost of niobium wire used in MRI.
Niobium, a hypoallergenic metal having several human health applications, has an uneven
grain size, which makes its use in MRO electromagnets difficult and expensive. My
research heat-treated high-purity niobium to determine if these treatments, at various
temperatures, could produce more uniform grain sizes and thus better ductility needed for
drawing niobium wire into electromagnets. The longer heat treatments with higher
temperatures produced larger grain sizes, a change needed for drawing niobium into wire
while avoiding breakage. While the samples showed different grain size bands (small
bands and large bands), this banding behavior diminished at longer times, a result that
suggests that constant grain growth could occur and produce a structure with uniform grain
size. Once uniform grain size is achieved, the results will help industry predict the grain
size according to a specific heat treatment. This research shows one way in which
manufacturing costs can be reduced by research.
Paragraph 4
The Role of Tumor Stress in the Progression of Prostate Cancer
Prostate cancer affects 1 in 6 men and is the second leading cause of cancer death in
men. Research to diagnosis its presence has become critical. Cancer generally
becomes deadly at the onset of metastasis, when cancer spreads from the initial tumor
to distant locations in the body. As prostate cancer progresses, dividing cells form a
solid tumor, leaving cells in the innermost region of the tumor with a lack of oxygen
and nutrients, a situation termed hypoxia. Hypoxic stress causes the transcription of
genes necessary for the progression of cancer from benign to metastatic. Previous
research by our lab discovered increased transcription of the enzyme 2OST when the
cell encountered a lack of oxygen. This finding suggests that expression of 2OST is
turned on in response to this hypoxic stress. Furthermore, our lab noted getting rid of
2OST made cells less metastatic, confirming 2OST’s vital role in the progression of
prostate cancer. My research investigates at the molecular level how stress promotes
2OST expression, ultimately initiating metastasis. This article will explain why
understanding why 2OST becomes highly expressed will help scientists develop
diagnostic tools to predict the onset of metastasis as well as drug therapies to stop the
increase of 2OST expression and halt the progression of prostate cancer.
Paragraph 5
By a strange perversity in the cosmic plan, the biologically good die young.
Species are not destroyed for their shortcomings, but for their achievements. The
tribes that slumber in the graveyards of the past were not the most simple and
undistinguished of their day, but the most complicated and conspicuous. The
magnificent sharks of the Devonian period passed with the passing of the period, but
certain contemporaneous genera of primitive shellfish are still on earth. Similarly,
the lizards of the Mesozoic era have long outlived the dinosaurs, which were
immeasurably their biologic betters. Illustrations such as these could be endlessly
increased. The price of distinction is death.
Alan DeVoe, “Nature’s Utmost”
Paragraph 6
Protective coloration is a familiar wonder of the natural world. It renders a
speckled fawn invisible in the sun-dappled thicket and makes the streaked neck of a
bitten indistinguishable among the reeds. In some creatures Nature has produced still
more astonishing protective colorations that can change with circumstances, enabling
various insects and lizards to shift from the green of leaves to the brown of withered
twigs and dressing weasels and snowshoe rabbits in earth-brown coats for summer
and snow-white coats for winter. But it is in the sea that Nature exhibits what is
perhaps the utmost triumphant of all her optical illusions. It is a quick change that
has to be seen to be believed. Its practitioners are squids. As the squid swims, its
body shows waving stripes of horizontal light and air, giving exactly the effect of
streaks of water in motion. As the squid comes to rest, these wavy horizontal streaks
are extinguished. At a wave of Nature’s wand, presto! Their place is taken by
vertical bands, shimmering and undulating. The motionless squid has miraculously
become, apparently, a bed of gently waving water weeds, difficult to detect.
Alan DeVoe, “Nature’s Utmost”
Paragraph 7
Climate no longer controls us as severely as we once supposed, but it still
limits us despite humankind’s efforts. Man’s ingenuity often overcomes geological
handicaps: he can irrigate deserts and air condition the Sahara; he can level or
surmount mountains and terrace the hills with vines; he can build a floating city to
cross the ocean or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a tornado can ruin in an
hour the city that took a century to build; an iceberg can overturn or bisect the
floating palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the Great Certainty.
Let rain become too rare, and civilization disappears under sand, as in Central Asia;
let it fall too furiously, and civilization will be choked with jungle, as in Central
America. Let the thermal average rise by twenty degrees in our thriving zones, and
we should probably relapse into lethargic savagery. In a semitropical climate a
nation of half a billion souls may breed like ants, but enervating heat may subject it to
repeated conquest by warriors from more stimulating habitats. Generations of men
establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in
its soil.
Paragraph 8
So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition
is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life—peaceful when food abounds,
violent when the mouth outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm;
civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation is real, and
increased with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of
competition; we co-operate in our group—our family, community, club, church,
party, race, or nation—in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other
groups. Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals:
acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride. Our states, being ourselves
multiplied, are what we are; they write our natures in bolder type and do our good
and evil on an elephantine scale. We are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because
our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and
fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they
should not soon capture another feast. War is the nation’s way of eating. It promotes
co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition. Until our states become
members of a large and effectively protective group, they will continue to act like
individuals and families in the hunting states.
Version 1—wordy; lengthy sentences; indirect presentation
I am presenting the famous seventeenth century quarrel of ancients and
Moderns as, at least in part, a birth pang of the Scientific Revolution, and a way of
understanding an inevitable suspicion that arose in this time between nascent
scientists and entrenched humanists. The mistrust between scientists and humanists
should have dissipated long ago, but it has unfortunately persisted as our legacy
today. I wish to show the complexity and multifaceted character of this founding
debate, so that we do not conceptualize the birth and later history of modern science
as a war with two unambiguous sides. We do not want to think of a clean dichotomy
that sees, on one side, dogmatic and hidebound humanities holding the fort of
Antiquity, and, on the other side, a progressive assault and inevitable break by
defenders of free inquiry and the power of new discovery. First of all, no mutual
hatred ever existed; nearly all founders of the scientific Revolution revered (and
liberally quoted) the great sources of Antiquity. They also believed (and proved) that
knowledge could progress by building upon those admirable foundations. For
example, both Bacon’s paradox and particularly Newton’s admirable image of
Antiquity have a firm foundation anchored by intellectual giants. Second, insofar as
we may specific sides in the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, the scorecard of
disciplinary affiliations does not identify the players of this particular game. In
particular, the ranks of modernists did not include only the new scientific scholars but
also encompassed many prominent intellectuals from literary and other humanistic
callings, including the theologian Hakewill. (260 words)
Version 2—concise; direct; organized
I present the seventeenth-century quarrel between ancients and Moderns as a
birth pang of the Scientific Revolution, a conflict between humanists and the first
scientists. I wish to show the complexity of this debate so that we do not view the
birth of modern science as a war between humanism and science, a distrust that
unfortunately still persists. First, no mutual hatred ever existed: nearly all founders
of the scientific Revolution revered the great sources of Antiquity. They also
believed (and proved) that knowledge could progress by building upon those revered
foundations. For example, both Bacon’s paradox and particularly Newton’s
admirable image of Antiquity have a firm intellectual basis. Second, in the Ancients
vs. Moderns quarrel disciplinarity was not a factor: the ranks of modernists included
intellectuals from all fields, including the theologian Hakewill. (134 words)
Paragraph 8
Learning how to turn in homework assignments on time is one of the most
valuable skills that college students can take with them into the working world.
Though the workforce may not assign homework to its workers in the
traditional sense, many of the objectives and jobs that need to be completed
require that employees work with deadlines. The deadlines that students
encounter in the classroom may be different in content when compared to the
deadlines of the workforce, but the importance of meeting those deadlines is the
same. In fact, failure to meet deadlines in both the classroom and the workforce
can have serious consequences. For example, in the classroom, students form a
contract with the teacher and the university when they enroll in a class. That
contract requires that students complete the assignments and objectives set forth
by the course's instructor in a specified time to receive a grade and credit for the
course. Accordingly, just as a student risks failing in the classroom if he/she does
not meet the deadline for a homework assignment, so, too, does that student risk
termination in the workforce. When a student fails to complete assignments by
the deadline, the student breaks his/her contract with the university and the
teacher. This often leaves the teacher with no other recourse than to fail the
student and the university with no other recourse than to deny the student credit
for the course. Developing good habits of turning in assignments now will aid
your performance as a future participant in the working world.