Developing paragraphs
When you develop ideas, you move your writing forward by giving it texture and depth. The following strategies are helpful ways to develop the ideas that support your thesis into a complete draft.
1. Narration. When you narrate, you tell a story. The following paragraph comes from a personal essay on the goods that result from "a lifetime of production":
My dad changed too. He had come to that job feeling -- as I do now-- that everything was still possible. He'd served his time in the air force during the Korean War. Then, while my mother worked as a secretary to support them, he earned a college degree courtesy of the GI Bill. After graduation, my father painted houses for a season until he was offered a position scheduling the production of corrugated board. He took it, though he has told me that he never planned to stay. It was not something he envisioned as his life's work. I try to imagine what it is like suddenly to look up from a stack of orders and discover that the job you started one December day has watched you age.
--Michelle M. Ducharme, "A Lifetime of Production." Newsweek 9 Sept.1996:00.
Notice that Ducharme begins with two sentences that state the topic and point of her narration. Then, using the past tense, she recounts in chronological sequence some key events that led up to her father's taking a job in the box manufacturing business.
2. Description. To make an object, person, or activity vivid for your readers, describe it in concrete, specific words that appeal to the senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. In the following example, a first-year student describes her impression of a photograph.
In the Paratrooper photograph, the rescuer's powerfully muscular arm is set firmly in the foreground and is so intensely illuminated that it appears lighter than the rest of his water-soaked body. The arm of the wounded man is also caught in the light. But it is oddly bent, as if to accentuate just how tightly-- and painfully-- these two bodies are intertwined. Here is a desperate yet loving embrace. Both soldiers are holding on to each other as if they were holding on to life-- to the human reality of this moment with its illuminating hope. Togetherness supports that life-giving hope and ensures its life-sustaining strength.
--Ilona Bouzoukashvili. "On Reading
Photographs." Student paper, 1994.
The writer uses words and phrases that appeal to the reader's sense of sight ("powerfully muscular arm," "oddly bent"). Emotionally-charged adjectives like "desperate," "loving," and "life-giving" give readers a clear sense of the writer's feelings about the subject. So too do the two "as if" constructions.
3. Classification. Classification is a useful way of grouping individual entities into identifiable categories. Classifying occurs in all academic disciplines and often appears with its complement – dividing, or breaking a whole entity into its parts.
[M]ost of America's traditional, routinized manufacturing jobs will disappear. So will routinized service jobs that can be done from remote locations, like keypunching of data transmitted by satellite. Instead, you will be engaged in one of two broad categories of work: either complex services, some of which will be sold to the rest of the world to pay for whatever Americans want to buy from the rest of the world, or person-to-person services, which foreigners can't provide for us because (apart from new immigrants and illegal aliens) they aren't here to provide them.
Complex services involve the manipulation of data and abstract symbols. Included in this category are insurance, engineering, law, finance, computer programming, and advertising. Such activities now account for almost 25 percent of our GNP, up from 13 percent in 1950. They have already surpassed manufacturing (down to about 20 percent of GNP). Even within the manufacturing sector, executive, managerial, and engineering positions are increasing at a rate almost three times that of total manufacturing employment. Most of these jobs, too, involve manipulating symbols.
--Robert Reich, "The Future of Work."
Harper's Apr. 1989: 26+
To make his ideas clear, Reich first classifies future work into two broad categories: complex services and person-to-person services. Then, in the next paragraph, he develops the idea of complex services in more detail, in part by dividing that category into more specific-- and familiar--categories like engineering and advertising.
4. Definition. Define any concepts that the reader needs to understand in order to follow your ideas. Interpretations and arguments often depend on one or two key ideas that cannot be quickly and easily defined. In the following example, John Berger defines "image," a key idea in his T.V. lectures on the way we see things:
An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved-- for a few moments or centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer's way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.
--John Berger, Ways of Seeing,
New York: Penguin, 1985. 9-10.
5. Illustration. No matter what your purpose and point may be, to appeal to readers you will have to show as well as tell. Detailed examples can make abstractions more concrete and support generalizations with specific instances, as the student writer has done in the following paragraph:
As Rubin explains, "for much of the Accord era, the ideal-typical family . . . was composed of a ‘stay-at-home-mom,' a working father, and dependent children. He earned wages; she cooked, cleaned, cared for the home, managed the family's social life, and nurtured the family members" (97). Just such an arrangement characterized my grandmother's married life. My grandmother, who had four children, stayed at home with them, while her husband went off to work as a safety engineer. Sadly, when he died, she was left with nothing. She needed to support herself, yet had no work experience, no credit, and little education. But even though society frowned on her for seeking employment, my grandmother eventually found a clerical position-- a low-level job with few perks.
--Jennifer Koehler, Response to Exercise #6, Sociology 352 (1997)
6. Comparison and Contrast. Comparison means exploring the similarities and differences among various items. When the term compare is used along with the term contrast, then compare is usually defined more narrowly as "to spell out key similarities." Contrast always means "to itemize important differences."
In the following example, the student writer uses a subject-by-subject pattern to contrast the ideas of two social commentators, Jeremy Rifkin and George Will:
Rifkin and Will have different opinions about unemployment due to downsizing and the widening income gap between rich and poor. Rifkin sees both the decrease in employment and the increase in income disparity as evils that must be immediately dealt with lest society fall apart: "If no measures are taken to provide financial opportunities for millions of Americans in an era of diminishing jobs, then . . . violent crime is going to increase" (3). Will, on the other hand, seems to believe that both unemployment and income differences are necessary to the health of American society. Will writes, "A society that chafes against stratification derived from disparities of talents will be a society that discourages individual talents" (92). Apparently, the society that Rifkin wants is just the kind of society that Will rejects.
--Jacob Grossman, "Dark Comes Before Dawn" Student paper (1996)
Notice that Grossman comments on Rifkin first and then turns to his second subject, George Will. To ensure paragraph unity, he begins with a topic sentence that mentions both subjects.
In the following paragraph, the student writer organizes her comparison point by point rather than subject by subject. Instead of saying everything about Smith's picture before taking up the AP photo, the writer moves back and forth between the two images as she makes and supports two points: first, that the images differ in figure and scene, and second, that they are similar in theme.
Divided by an ocean, two photographers took pictures that at first glance seem absolutely different. W. Eugene Smith's well-known Tomoko in the Bath and the less well-known AP photo A Paratrooper Works to Save the Life of a Buddy portray distinctively different settings and people. Smith brings us into a darkened room where a Japanese woman is lovingly bathing her malformed child, while the AP staff photographer captures two soldiers on the battlefield, one intently performing CPR on his wounded friend. But even though the two images seem as different as women and men, peace and war or life and death, both pictures figure something similar: a time of suffering. It is the early 1970's-- a time when the hopes and dreams that modernity promoted are being exposed as deadly to human beings. Perhaps that is why the bodies in both pictures seem humbled. Grief pulls you down onto your knees. Terror impels you to crawl along the ground.
--Ilona Bouzoukashvili, "On Reading Photographs," Student paper (1994)
7. Analogy. An analogy compares topics that at first glance seem quite different. A well-chosen analogy can make new or technical information appear more commonplace and understandable:
The human eye provides a good starting point for learning how a camera works. The lens of the eye is like the lens of the camera. In both instruments the lens focuses an image of the surroundings on a light sensitive surface-- the retina of the eye and the film in the camera. In both, the light-sensitive material is protected within a light-tight container-- the eyeball of the eye and the body of the camera. Both eye and camera have a mechanism for shutting off light passing through the lens to the interior of the container-- the lid of the eye and the shutter of the camera. In both, the size of the lens opening, or aperture, is regulated by an iris diaphragm.
Marvin Rosen, Introduction to Photography Boston:Houghton, 1982. 1.
8 Process. When you need to explain how to do something or show readers how something is done, you will use process analysis, explaining each step in the process in chronological order, as in the following example:
To end our Hawan ritual of thanks, aarti is performed. First, my mother lights a piece of camphor in a metal plate called a taree. Holding the taree with her right hand, she moves the fire in a circular, clockwise movement in front of the altar. Next, she stands in front of my father and again moves the fiery taree in a circular, clockwise direction. After touching his feet and receiving his blessing, she attends to each of us children in turn, moving the fire in a clockwise direction before kissing us, one by one. When she is done, my father performs his aarti in a similar way and then my sister and I do ours. When everyone is done, we say some prayers and sit down.
--Janine Roopnarian, Student paper
9. Cause and Effect. Use this strategy when you need to trace the causes of some event or situation, or describe its effects. In the following example, Norman Cousins explains the causes of the career-ending injuries that can plague professional athletes:
Professional athletes are sometimes severely disadvantaged by trainers whose job it is to keep them in action. The more famous the athlete, the greater the risk that he or she may be subjected to extreme medical measures when injury strikes. The star baseball pitcher whose arm is sore because of a torn muscle or tissue damage may need sustained rest more than anything else. But his team is battling for a place in the World Series; so the trainer or team doctor, called upon to work his magic, reaches for a strong dose of Butazolidine or other powerful pain suppressants. Presto, the pain disappears! The pitcher takes his place on the mound and does superbly. That could be the last game, however, in which he is able to throw a ball with full strength. The drugs didn't repair the torn muscle or cause the damaged tissue to heal. What they did was to mask the pain, enabling the pitcher to throw hard, further damaging the torn muscle. Little wonder that so many star athletes are cut down in their prime, more the victims of overzealous treatment of their injuries than of the injuries themselves.
--Norman Cousins, "Pain Is Not the Ultimate Enemy"