Logical patterns used for organizing essays can also help you develop and arrange paragraphs.

Narration

Narration involves telling a story of some kind. It asks you to set the story in a context readers can understand, providing any necessary background and descriptive details as well as chronological markers and transitions (later that day, the following morning, and so on) to guide readers through the story.

Although narrative paragraphs usually follow chronological order, they sometimes use such variations as flashbacks and flash-forwards. Some narratives include dialogue; some gradually lead to a climax, the most dramatic point in the story.

The following narrative paragraph tells a personal story to support a point about the dangers of racing bicycles with flimsy alloy frames. Starting with a topic sentence, the paragraph proceeds chronologically and builds to a climax.

People who have been exposed to the risk of dangerously designed bicycle frames have paid too high a price. I saw this danger myself in the 1984 Putney Race. An expensive Stowe-Shimano graphite frame failed, and the rider was catapulted onto Vermont pavement at fifty miles per hour. The pack of riders behind him was so dense that most other racers crashed into a tangled, sliding heap. The aftermath: four hospitalizations. I got off with some stitches, a bad road rash, and severely pulled tendons. My Italian racing bike was pretzeled, and my racing was over for that summer. Others were not so lucky. An Olympic hopeful, Brian Stone of the Northstar team, woke up in a hospital bed to find that his cycling was over—and not just for that summer. His kneecap had been surgically removed. He couldn’t even walk.

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Description

Description uses specific details to create a clear impression. In the following descriptive paragraph, the writer includes details about the appearance of New York’s Chrysler Building and its effect on those who see it. Although a topic sentence may be unnecessary in such a paragraph, sometimes a topic sentence at the beginning helps set the scene.

The Chrysler Building, completed in 1930, still attracts the eyes of tourists and New Yorkers alike with its shiny steel exterior. The Chrysler cars of the era are incorporated into the design: the eagle-head gargoyles on the upper vertices of the building are shaped like the automobiles’ hood ornaments, and winged details imitate Chrysler radiator caps. At night, an elaborate lighting scheme spotlights the sleek, powerful eagles from below—turning them into striking silhouettes—and picks out each of the upper stories’ famed triangular windows, arching up into the darkness like the rays of a stylized sun.

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Illustration

You will often gather examples to illustrate a point. If you write an essay discussing how one novelist influenced another, you might cite examples from the second writer’s books that echo themes or characters from the first writer’s works. For a pamphlet appealing for donations to the Red Cross, you might use photographs showing situations in which donations helped people in trouble, along with appropriate descriptions. For maximum effect, you may want to arrange examples in order of increasing importance unless your genre calls for an attention-grabbing initial illustration.

To support the topic sentence in the following illustration paragraph, Mari Sandoz uses one long example about her short hair and short stature.

ILLUSTRATION WITH A SINGLE EXAMPLE

The Indians made names for us children in their teasing way. Because our very busy mother kept my hair cut short, like my brothers’, they called me Short Furred One, pointing to their hair and making the sign for short, the right hand with fingers pressed close together, held upward, back out, at the height intended. With me this was about two feet tall, the Indians laughing gently at my abashed face. I am told that I was given a pair of small moccasins that first time, to clear up my unhappiness at being picked out from the dusk behind the fire and my two unhappy shortcomings made conspicuous.

—MARI SANDOZ, “The Go-Along Ones”

In the following excerpt, John Rickford offers several reasons that underlie linguists’ argument that Ebonics is not “poor grammar” but a legitimate and powerful dialect of English.

ILLUSTRATION WITH SEVERAL REASONS

Why do linguists see the issue so differently from most other people? A founding principle of our science is that we describe how people talk; we don’t judge how language should or should not be used. A second principle is that all languages, if they have enough speakers, have dialects—regional or social varieties that develop when people are separated by geographic or social barriers. And a third principle, vital for understanding linguists’ reactions to the Ebonics controversy, is that all languages and dialects are systematic and rule-governed. Every human language and dialect that we have studied to date—and we have studied thousands—obeys distinct rules of grammar and pronunciation.

—JOHN RICKFORD, “Suite for Ebony and Phonics”

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Definition

You may develop a topic by definition—by saying what something is (or is not) and perhaps by identifying the characteristics that distinguish it from things that are similar or in the same general category. If you write about poverty in your community, for example, you would have to define very carefully what level of income, assets, or other measure defines a person, family, or household as “poor.” In an essay about Pentecostalism, you might explain what characteristics separate Pentecostalism from related religious movements.

When you write a paragraph to define a word or concept, you will often want to combine definition with other patterns of development. In the following paragraph, Timothy Tregarthen starts with a definition of economics and then uses examples to support it:

Economics is the study of how people choose among the alternatives available to them. It’s the study of little choices (“Should I take the chocolate or the strawberry?”) and big choices (“Should we require a reduction in energy consumption in order to protect the environment?”). It’s the study of individual choices, choices by firms, and choices by governments. Life presents each of us with a wide range of alternative uses of our time and other resources; economists examine how we choose among those alternatives.

—TIMOTHY TREGARTHEN, Economics

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Division and classification

Division means breaking a single topic into separate parts; classification means grouping many separate items of information about a topic according to their similarities. An essay about military recruiting policies might divide the military into different branches—army, navy, air force, and so on—and examine how each recruits volunteers. For a project on women’s roles in the eighteenth century, you could organize your notes by classification: information related to women’s education, occupations, legal status, and so on.

In the following paragraph, note how Aaron Copland divides the listening process into three parts:

DIVISION

We all listen to music according to our separate capacities. But, for the sake of analysis, the whole listening process may become clearer if we break it up into its component parts, so to speak. In a certain sense, we all listen to music on three separate planes. For lack of a better terminology, one might name these (1) the sensuous plane, (2) the expressive plane, (3) the sheerly musical plane. The only advantage to be gained from mechanically splitting up the listening process into these hypothetical planes is the clearer view to be had of the way in which we listen.

—AARON COPLAND, What to Listen for in Music

In this paragraph, the writer classifies, or separates, fad dieters into two groups:

CLASSIFICATION

Two types of people are seduced by fad diets. Those who have always been overweight turn to them out of despair; they have tried everything, and yet nothing seems to work. The second group to succumb appear perfectly healthy but are baited by slogans such as “look good, feel good.” These slogans prompt self-questioning and insecurity—do I really look good and feel good?—and, as a direct result, many healthy people fall prey to fad diets. With both types of people, however, the problems surrounding such diets are numerous and dangerous. In fact, these diets provide neither intelligent nor effective answers to weight control.

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Comparison and contrast

Comparison focuses on the similarities between two things, whereas contrast highlights their differences, but the two are often used together. You can structure paragraphs that compare and contrast in two different ways, following the block method or the alternating method.

The following example paragraph uses the block method, presenting all the information on one group of people, “the veterans,” in one section and all the information on the other group, “the rookies,” in another.

BLOCK METHOD

You could tell the veterans from the rookies by the way they were dressed. The knowledgeable ones had their heads covered by kerchiefs, so that if they were hired, tobacco dust wouldn’t get in their hair; they had on clean dresses that by now were faded and shapeless, so that if they were hired they wouldn’t get tobacco dust and grime on their best clothes. Those who were trying for the first time had their hair freshly done and wore attractive dresses; they wanted to make a good impression. But the dresses couldn’t be seen at the distance that many were standing from the employment office, and they were crumpled in the crush.

—MARY MEBANE, “Summer Job”

The following example uses an alternating comparison, moving back and forth between the characteristics of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

ALTERNATING METHOD

Malcolm X emphasized the use of violence in his movement and employed the biblical principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” King, on the other hand, felt that blacks should use nonviolent civil disobedience and employed the theme of “turning the other cheek,” which Malcolm X rejected as “beggarly” and “feeble.” The philosophy of Malcolm X was one of revenge, and often it broke the unity of black Americans. More radical blacks supported him, while more conservative ones supported King. King thought that blacks should transcend their humanity. In contrast, Malcolm X thought they should embrace it and reserve their love for one another, regarding whites as “devils” and the “enemy.” King’s politics were those of a rainbow, but Malcolm X’s rainbow was insistently one color—black. The distance between Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking and Malcolm X’s was the distance between growing up in the seminary and growing up on the streets, between the American dream and the American reality.

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Cause and effect

Cause-effect analysis may deal with causes, effects, or both. If you examine why something happens or happened, you are investigating causes. If you explain what has occurred or is likely to occur from a set of conditions, you are discussing effects. An environmental-impact study of the probable consequences of building a proposed dam, for instance, would focus on effects. On the other hand, a video essay on the breakdown of authority in inner-city schools might begin with the effects of the breakdown and trace them back to their causes.

The following paragraph discusses the causes that led pediatrician Phil Offit to study science and become a physician:

To understand exactly why Offit became a scientist, you must go back more than half a century, to 1956. That was when doctors in Offit’s hometown of Baltimore operated on one of his legs to correct a club foot, requiring him to spend three weeks recovering in a chronic care facility with 20 other children, all of whom had polio. Parents were allowed to visit just one hour a week, on Sundays. His father, a shirt salesman, came when he could. His mother, who was pregnant with his brother and hospitalized with appendicitis, was unable to visit at all. He was five years old. “It was a pretty lonely, isolating experience,” Offit says. “But what was even worse was looking at these other children who were just horribly crippled and disfigured by polio.” That memory, he says, was the first thing that drove him toward a career in pediatric infectious diseases.

—AMY WALLACE, “An Epidemic of Fear”

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Process

You may need to develop a paragraph to explain a process—that is, to describe how something happens or is done, usually in chronological order, as this paragraph illustrates.

In July of 1877, Eadweard Muybridge photographed a horse in motion with a camera fast enough to capture clearly the split second when the horse’s hooves were all off the ground—a moment never before caught on film. His next goal was to photograph a sequence of such rapid images. In June of 1878, he set up twelve cameras along a track, each connected to a tripwire. Then, as a crowd watched, a trotting horse raced down the track pulling a two-wheeled carriage. The carriage wheels tripped each camera in quick succession, snapping a dozen photographs. Muybridge developed the negatives and displayed them to an admiring public that same morning. His technical achievement helped to pave the way for the first motion pictures a decade later.

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Problem and solution

Moving from a problem to a solution is a natural way to organize certain kinds of information. For example, a student studying motorcycle parking on campus decided to organize his writing in just this way: he identified a problem (the need for more parking) and then offered two possible solutions, along with visuals to help readers imagine the solutions. Many assignments in engineering, business, and economics call for a similar organizational strategy.

A paragraph developed in the problem-solution pattern opens with a topic sentence that states a problem or asks a question about a problem; then it offers a solution or an answer to the question, as in the following example from a review of Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger’s book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility:

Unfortunately, at the moment growth means burning more fossil fuel. . . . How can that fact be faced? How to have growth that Americans want, but without limits that they instinctively oppose, and still reduce carbon emissions? [Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s] answer is: investments in new technology. Acknowledge that America “is great at imagining, experimenting, and inventing the future,” and then start spending. They cite examples ranging from the nuclear weapons program to the invention of the Internet to show what government money can do, and argue that too many clean-energy advocates focus on caps instead.

—BILL MCKIBBEN, “Can Anyone Stop It?”

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Analogy

An analogy establishes connections between two things or ideas. Analogies are particularly helpful in explaining something new in terms of something very familiar. Likening the human genome to a map, for example, helps explain the complicated concept of the genome to those unfamiliar with it.

This paragraph makes an analogy between storytelling and Olympic diving:

Since the advent of Hollywood editing, back in the earliest days of cinema, the goal of filmmakers has been for us to feel the movement of the camera but not to be aware of it, to look past the construction of the media, to ignore the seams in the material. Just as an Olympic diver smiles and hides the effort as she catapults skyward and manages to pull off multiple flips while seemingly twisting in both directions, good storytelling—whether oral, in print, or visual—typically hides the construction and the hard work that go into making it. Both the medal-winning dives and the best stories are more intricate than they appear.

—STEPHEN APKON, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

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Reiteration

Reiteration is a method of development that you may recognize from political speeches or some styles of preaching. In this pattern, the writer states the main point of a paragraph and then restates it, hammering home the point and often building in intensity as well. In the following passage from Barack Obama’s 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama contrasts what he identifies as the ideas of “those who are preparing to divide us” with memorable references to common ground and unity, including repeated references to the United States as he builds to his climactic point:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us—the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and an Asian America—there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into Red States and Blue States: Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

—BARACK OBAMA

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Combined patterns

Most paragraphs combine patterns of development. In the following paragraph, the writer begins with a topic sentence and then divides his topic (the accounting systems used by American companies) into two subtopics (the system used to summarize a company’s overall financial state and the one used to measure internal transactions). Next he develops the second subtopic through illustration (the assessment of costs for a delivery truck shared by two departments) and cause and effect (the system produces some disadvantages).

Most American companies have basically two accounting systems. One system summarizes the overall financial state to inform stockholders, bankers, and other outsiders. That system is not of interest here. The other system, called the managerial or cost accounting system, exists for an entirely different reason. It measures in detail all of the particulars of transactions between departments, divisions, and key individuals in the organization, for the purpose of untangling the interdependencies between people. When, for example, two departments share one truck for deliveries, the cost accounting system charges each department for part of the cost of maintaining the truck and driver, so that at the end of the year, the performance of each department can be individually assessed, and the better department’s manager can receive a larger raise. Of course, all of this information processing costs money, and furthermore may lead to arguments between the departments over whether the costs charged to each are fair.

—WILLIAM OUCHI, “Japanese and American Workers: Two Casts of Mind”

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Talking the Talk: Paragraph length