Rules for Writers Chapter 4

Chapter 4 from “Rules for Writers”, by Diana Hacker, is about building effective paragraphs.  The body of an essay is meant to support its main point, thus Hacker suggests to “Aim for paragraphs that are clearly focused, well developed, organized, coherent, and neither too long nor too short for easy reading.”(p. 40).  It’s good to state the main idea of the paragraph at some point.  It’s common for the topic sentence to be located at the beginning of the paragraph but it could also be found after a transitional sentence, or even, at the end of the paragraph.  Also, some professional writers and Journalist might not use a clear topic sentence on their writings.  Hacker says that when writing a paragraph you must stick to the point.  Adding sentences that do not relate to the topic sentence may cause confusion and lost the interest of the reader.  When this happens, the sentence(s) has to be taken off or move somewhere else on the paper, depending on its importance.  All of the sentences must relate somehow to the topic sentence.  Moreover, Hacker gives some “suitable patters of organization” (p. 44) which would make easier the flow of the paragraph.  Those are:  examples and illustration, narration, description, process, comparison and contrast, analogy, cause and effect, definition, and classification and division.  Along with this patters she also gives ideas to make a paragraph more coherent by providing clear ideas with specific details and facts or examples.  Hacker also mentions that “repeating key words” (51) with different variation helps gain coherence without overwhelming the reader.  It’s important to provide ‘good’ transition words between sentences; since these would create flow from sentence to sentence.  Transition words are separate on different categories according to its purpose, which could be, to show addition, to give examples, to compare, to contrast, to summarize or conclude, to show time, to show place or direction, and to indicate logical relationship.  It is also important to provide transitions between paragraphs; you can do this by relating the idea of the paragraph to the one from the previous paragraph.  Finally, Hacker suggests keeping in mind the length of the paragraph.  There would be occasions in which the paragraph might need to be shorten by starting a new one, or combine with another paragraph if it “looks too choppy” (p. 57).

It’s been a while since I’ve gone over transition words, and patters of organization; this chapter would be very useful on refreshing those concepts.  Also I have a hard time deciding when is a good time to start a new paragraph without cutting it before time.  I was taught that short paragraphs don’t work, and I would always be confused when I would see them on certain readings but after reading this chapter I understand why they might not always work and in which occasions it might be appropriated to have one.  I’ll go back to this chapter later since I feel like I didn’t get everything down.