So, in this next module, we're going to move up from sentences to paragraphs.
Talking about paragraphs. And we'll continue the discussion of
paragraphs and even get into whole compositions, into next week.
So, when you think of the paragraph, I want you to think of the paragraph as the
unit of composition of your manuscript. So, each paragraph should contain one main
idea, and you should think in paragraphs when you're organizing your man, your
manuscript. So, one idea per paragraph is often a lot
less than scientists try to stuff into a single paragraph.
You'll see, in the scientific literature, these just massive paragraphs that are too
complex, there's too much going on in them.
That's really hard on the reader. So, use the paragraph to delineate to your
reader where you're switching to new ideas.
One idea per paragraph. Keep your paragraphs relatively short.
If you pick up professional writing, like a magazine, you'll notice that they might
have three, four, five sentences in a paragraph.
We don't need to be quite that short in, in the scientific literature, but we
probably shouldn't be much longer than that.
And, the advantages of having small paragraphs that aren't too long, one of
the major advantages is that it provides a lot of white space on the page and that's
really, really important to readers. So, if you're faced, as a reader, with a
page that's just kind of full of a huge block of text with no breaks, no breaks
into paragraphs, it's really daunting cuz you kinda know it's going to be tedious
and hard to get through. And, it's just this, you know, it's very
intimidating. So, try to break things up.
This is one of those things that I often encourage students to do is just to break
up, they often have too many things in one paragraph.
Start to break it up into more paragraphs. Try to keep one idea to, per paragraph.
Another tip on paragraphs is that the way that scientists writes tends to be the
following. So, scientists like to put details,
details, data, supporting data, conclusion.
That's the way scientists think, of course, right?
We start with the details and the data, we, we go through and end at the
conclusion. However, when you go to write things up,
I'm going to encourage you to invert that. I would encourage you to give away the
punch line early because its really hard on the reader to weed through all of these
details if they don't know where you're going, if they don't know what the take
home message is. So, you're going to want to give away the
punchline, give the conclusion to take home the message first, and then, fill it
in with all the details. That way your reader knows where you're
going, the reader knows what to expect. Otherwise, it's just a massive amount of
details that the reader has to weed through.
So, in journalism, we call this the inverted pyramid style.
You kind of start with the most important point the kind of take home message, and
kind of filter down from there with the supporting ideas.
Give away the punchline early. Now, I should note, that you may have
learned somewhere along the way, to use topic sentences.
Or you may have been encouraged to use topic sentences.
And, I don't want to, I don't want to say that you have to use topic sentences.
This idea of giving away the punch line early is kind of similar to topic
sentences. But, I, on the other hand, am not a huge
fan of topic sentences. I think it's a little bit confining if you
feel like you have to start every paragraph with an exact statement of the
aim of the paragraph. You know, and it becomes a little bit
monotonous, too. So, I'm not a big fan of topic sentences.
But the general idea of trying to get your main take home message, you know, given
away early in, in the paragraph, that's a good idea.
It doesn't mean you have to go all the way, quite as extreme as topic sentences.
Another tip on paragraphs is that, in terms of paragraph flow, making your
paragraphs flow nicely, within a paragraph I'm talking about for the moment, you
rally wanna rely first primarily on the logical flow of ideas.
So, that's the main thing that's going to make a paragraph flow well.
It's not transition words, it's not the language, it's the logical organization of
the ideas and I'll give you some more examples of that.
So, if you have good logic, you're building up your ideas in a logical way,
your reader actually can fill in a lot of the gaps.
You gotta trust your reader a little bit that they don't need a lot of pointers if
you organize it in, in a way that's very predicable.
Paragraph flow can also be help by using a parallel sentence structure, which we've
talked about in the last module. And sometimes, I'm going to show you a
couple examples where you have a compare contrast.
And, if you make multiple sentences, across multiple sentences, you make those
different sentences parallel in someway, that can help the flow of the paragraph
within the paragraph as well. And then, finally, at the very end, I've
put a big, you know, if necessary, then, you can also use transition words.
So, transition words definitely have their place, they can be very helpful in cluing
your reader in on where you're going. However, transition words are highly,
highly overused. And so, I have students where I've edited
almost every sentence starts with a transition word.
So, I really want you to catch yourself if you find yourself reaching for too many
transition words, that's probably indicating that you're overusing
transition words. And, the reason students tend to overuse
them, is that they use them kind of as a crutch to make up for the fact that their
logic isn't actually that sound. And so, they're throwing in those
transition words to try to kinda, you know, help fix the fact that their logic
underneath is poor. But, that's not gonna fix it.
You need to go back and fix the logic don't rely on those transition words.
They're not, they're not strong enough to fix underlying logic that's not sound.
So, use those sparingly. And, don't, don't be too exotic with your
transition words either. You'll notice in a lot of professional
writing, the favorite transition word is the word but, B, U, T.
It's a great way to indicate to the reader, hey, but, I'm going to be changing
gears here a little bit. So, you don't need fancy nevertheless, on
the other hand, you can just use the word but, B, U, T.
And then finally, the final tip on paragraphs is keep in mind that your
reader will tend to remember the first sentence and the last sentence the best.
So, again, you're kinda giving away your take home message in that first sentence,
and you want to make that last sentence kinda memorable.
Have a little build-up to the last sentence, a little emphasis at the end.
That can make a really good paragraph. So, in terms of the logical flow of ideas,
what do I mean by that? So, when you're writing in your paragraph
you, again, you just want your ideas to kind of flow from one another, and that
means a couple of possible things. So, so for example, if you go sequential
in time, if you have some kind of history you're talking about, going sequentially
in time starting from the first and going to the later, that's just a natural way
that peoples, you know, peoples' brains work.
So, sticking to kind of a natural easy timeline can be very helpful.
So, I'd like to say, you should avoid the approach of that movie Memento that was
out in 2000 which had this very bizarre timeline.
You know, movie maker, movie directors may like to do it that way, and it might be
interesting for a movie, but very hard on a reader of a scientific literature if you
mess around with a timeline. So, just go with a natural timeline, in
general. Another way to make your ideas kinda flow
logically is to start with something that's a general and then move the
specific. So, like how to get the take home message,
the, the general point, and then give the specific examples.
So, that's how, has a nice logical flow to it as well.
And then, you can always think about when you're organizing your paragraphs, I was a
philosophy major undergraduate, so I took a lot of logic where we did, you know, if
A, then B, A therefore B. So , I sometimes, will think of my
arguments in terms of kind of logical arguments, almost mathematically.
And that can be really helpful in organizing your ideas, is actually to
think about the logical arguments that you're making.
And make sure that your logic underneath those arguments is sound.
So, I'm going to start here with an example paragraph.
It was from something that I was reading in The New Yorker a few years back.
It was about a, a bound, bounty hunter, as in bondsman, and bonds women as well.
And, it has some good principles about organization of a paragraph.
So, it says, usually, when a defendant absconds, a bondsman highers a bounty
hunter to find and arrest him within the grace period.
Which, in California, is six months. Notice these parenthesis.
If that fails, the bondman tries to seize any collateral that the defendant put down
to secure the bond, or sues the defendant's indemnitors who signed the
bail application as guarantors. But, notice the use of but as the
transition word there, but Zabala hadn't put down any collateral, and so far Green,
one of the few bonds men who always do their own bounty hunting, had found
neither him nor his indemnitors. The grace period was nearly up.
Soon, Green would have to pay the court $31,000.
So, there's a lot of things in here I could point out about the logic of this
paragraph. An interesting topic, obviously.
So, notice that they go kind of in logical time sequence order.
First, this happens, then this happens, and they also do a general to specific.
So, they have first, a bondsman hires a bounty hunter to find and arrest the
defendant, that happens first. And then, if they are unable to find and
arrest the defendant, the bondsman will seize the collateral or sue the
indemnitor. So, there's an order to these things.
There's also a general to specific here because that's the general case.
It's just telling you, I didn't know very much about bounty hunters and bondsmen
before reading this article. So, it's just telling you how this whole
process works in case you don't know. This is the general way it works.
It gives that first and then it moves to the specifics of this particular case.
So, now, in this specific case, the defendant, Zabala is AWOL.
And, for some reason, had no collaterals or indemnitors available.
So, well, what does that mean? Here's the conclusion.
In this case, since there none that happened, there's nothing available, the
bonds man, in fact, in this story, it was a bonds woman, Green is out of options.
So, that means that she's going to have to pay the $31,000.
And notice how when I'm kind of laying out the logic of this, I used first, and then,
now, conclusion, in this specific case. I'm giving a lot of pointers just to kind
of show you the logic. But the author, when they're writing this
paragraph, didn't need all those pointers, because, because it was organized in a
logical way. The reader can just follow it pretty much
without those, you know, without spelling out first, and then, and now, and so on.
So, there's also a logical, set of logical arguments here, like a mathematical set of
logical arguments. So, a bondsman has these, and only these
options, exactly three options. Here they are.
You gotta hire a bounty period to find and arrest the guy within the grace period,
that's one option. Or, if that fails, you can seize the
collateral or sue the indemnitor. So, you, you take whatever the, the
defendant left behind. And then, if that fails, you gotta pay the
money yourself, the, the bonds man or woman, has to pay the money him or her
self. So, those are the three options.
Some, that, the money is owed to the court, one of those things has to happen.
So, in this case, out of those three options, which one, what happened?
Well, the grace period is done and there is no arrest yet.
There was no collateral, there was no idemnitors.
So, what's the conclusion? What's going to, has to happen?
Well, there's only one option left, that Green, the bonds woman has to, is, has to
pay that $31,000 herself. So, you can see what actually kind of a
nice logical argument under that. And, sometimes they can even map those out
in kind of A, B, C terms. I want to point out to you, the transition
words used in this paragraph. There were couple but not too many, Right?
So, there is an if, there's that but, B, U, T, and that tells you where is
switching modes, and there was assumed. But notice, we didn't have to start with
every sentence here with a transition word, we just need a couple of key small
transition words. Nothing fancy and not too many of them.
And then, one more thing I want to pick, point out about this paragraph, it has a
really nice ending, okay? So, it ends, but Zabala hadn't put down
any collateral, and so far Green, one of the few bondsmen who always do their own
bounty hunting, had found neither him nor his indemnitors.
So, notice the use of dashes in that sentence.
That's kinda long, complex sentence, with dashes and everything.
And then, we get a short sentence. The grace period was nearly up.
Soon, Green would have to pay the court $31,000.
So, we get this kind of long sentence, complex sentence, short sentence, and then
a little bit longer sentence. Notice the variety in the sentence
structure. That provides a really nice build up for
the conclusion there. And, it ends with this memorable
conclusion, well, this person Green is going to owe the court a lot of money.
So, those are some pointing, pointers for how to organize your paragraph in a
logical fashion and really make your paragraph work.
So now, I'm going to give you a paragraph that needs a little bit of editing.
So, this paragraph was from a scientific paper.
And the goal of this paper was the scientists took a bunch of perfume scents,
you know, put them in test tubes, have a bunch of participants come in.
And, and smell the various scents and rate them for their preferences.
So, some people will like a certain scent and won't like other scents.
So, they have them rate these various scents.
Then, they took their blood and measured their DNA and measured the genetic
markers. And they're trying to see whether or not
your preference for various scents might correlate to your genetic makeup.
And there's some reason to believe, a scientific reason to believe that, that
might be true. So, that was the experiment.
And, in this paragraph I pulled out of the conclusion sections specifically from the
limitation section of this paper. So, where they were trying to give the
potential limitations, and tell you kind of how they guard you against those
limitations. So, this paragraph was about potential
limitation of their experimental set. So, because they have to give this
different perfumes for everybody to smell, they got to have some choice in terms of
exactly the concentration that they were going to use for the different scents.
And there's some issues with choosing the concentrations.
Actually, really important for this experiment because if you put too high of
a concentration, it turns out that when it's a really high concentration, it's so
intense and overpowering that most people will just be turned off to that scent.
So, you don't want to put everything at too high of a concentration.
And, similarly, if you put things at too low of a concentration, maybe the smell
turns out to be not that pleasant just cuz you're not getting enough of it.
So, you have to be very careful about the concentrations, and so they're telling you
exactly how they chose those. So, they chose the concentration by
standardizing against a reference substance.
So, let me give you some additional details here.
So, if you have time and you want to pause the video now and take a stab at editing
this paragraph on your own, it's tricky because you don't have the background
here. But, hopefully, I've given you enough
background. You might be able to figure this one out.
If not, I'm just going to kinda lead you through how I would approach this and I'm
going to point out some interesting things about this paragraph to note.
By the way, the original paragraph had 212 words.
I actually ran out of room in that last sentence, so I didn't quite put the whole
paragraph here. But, you get, you'll get most of it.
It was 212 words, which was quite long. Not so many sentences, but some very long
sentences in here. So, I want to point out a few things about
this paragraph. So, notice that there is quite a few
transition words here. We get a nevertheless, a hence, a however,
and interestingly. So, there's a lot of kind of back and
forth, telling the reader, I'm going here, I'm going there.
A lot of pointing out to the reader where you're going.
And, that usually belies, comes some problems with the underlying logic.
And if you, you know, have read this paragraph from start to finish, you will
notice that it's pretty difficult to follow.
Actually, I should read it through for you now just to kind of give you a sense of
how difficult it is to kind of make heads or tails of this paragraph.
So, it says, most scents remain constant in their quality over orders of magnitude
of concentration. Nevertheless, at high concentrations,
quality tends to be negatively correlated with intensity, as was the case, for
example, with the cinnamon oil used in the study.
Hence, reliability of absolute scorings was achieved by calibrating the amount of
perfume ingredients with initial ratings for intensity against a reference
substance of known concentration. The final concentrations were in principle
chosen in a way such that individual ratings showed variants among the
participants within the sliding scale between zero and ten.
Meaning, that people could decide whether or not they like scent.
This procedure seems successful for most scents, however, the concentrations for,
bearinga, Bergamot and Vetiver could probably have been reduced even more as
both scents did not show any discriminating power at the level of
common alleles. People largely agreed on the quality of
these two scents, see table two. Interestingly, the pooled rare alleles
showed discriminating power. So, there's a lot going on in this
paragraph. And, probably, the editors, as you think
that's quite a bit to make it a little bit more concise and bring out the logic of it
a little bit more. So, one thing the point also transition
words. Again, if you have a lot of transition
words, that sometimes is a good clue that you need some work on the logic of the
paragraph. Another quick thing I want to just point
out is, as I was reading this over to prepare these lines, I recognized that
there's actually a spelling error in here. This is the kind of spelling error that
you know, word or your word processing program isn't going to pick up because
it's the final concentration wherein principal, well, that's spelled correctly
but it's the wrong word choice here for principal, right?
Principal is your pal. Principle, and what you want here is the
final concentrations for in principle, which is the P, L, E.
So, your spellcheckers not going to catch that one.
And, in fact, the copy editors for this journal didn't catch that one, nobody
caught that one. It's not a big deal, but I'll just point
out there, you know, to be careful on usage.
And, one final thing I want to point out in this paragraph is that interestingly,
the authors of this paper actually did use parentheses.
We talked about using parenthesis in an earlier module to stick in extra
information, and the authors actually did that here.
Not all, scientific papers will you see this.
And, interestingly enough, I really liked the stuff that was in the parenthesis cuz
that was the most clear to me. In fact, that, they, they seem to want to
like every time they write the kind of long complicated thing, they want to tell
you to clarify it for you in the parenthesis.
Oh, this is what I mean. Meaning, that people can decide whether
they like the sentence or not. Oh, this is what I mean.
People agreed largely on the quality of these two sentences.
And, that's the easiest thing to understand in the, in the whole paragraph
are those two little things. So, it's almost like they didn't want to
put it in simple language but they, they kinda recognized that they needed a little
simple language so they stuck it in. Anyway, it's good to use the parenthesis,
although it kinda shows you that maybe what they should of taken what was in the
paragraph and made that, built that into the, into the a paragraph itself.
So, when I am approaching and editing a paragraph like this, what I need to do is,
first of all, I got to understand what it is that the authors were really trying to
say. And, sometimes that's a challenge.
Sometimes I have to go back to the authors and kinda ask them, what is it you were
trying to get at? What was the main point of this paragraph?
What were you trying to do in this paragraph?
And so, I actually didn't go back to these authors, but I was able to piece it out
from reading it over many times and from the context.
So, then, once I kinda figure out what the paragraph is about, the main point, then I
can try to kinda weed through all the sentences and figure out exactly what is
it that the authors were trying to get out.
What were they trying to tell the readers? Is some of that unimportant?
Can we delete, and a lot of times there's extra details that we don't even need and,
and, and, you know, they're not really contributing to the main idea of the
paragraph. A lot of times we can weed those out.
So, there's a way that in my head I don't usually build a formula outline, but in my
head as I'm editing things, I tend to kind of build a very simple outline.
I don't necessarily write this down, but I think it's helpful for, for the purposes
of teaching to write this kind of outline out very explicitly.
So, first I gotta ask myself, well, what was the main idea of that paragraph?
What were they trying to get at? So, I think what they were trying to get
at here was just asking the questions, cuz this is a possible limitation in the
study. Whether or not the perfume concentrations
that they picked in their experiment were appropriate?
If they didn't pick good concentration, that could have greatly affected the
results. So, they're trying to tell you that they
did an okay job at picking the concentrations is this paragraph.
So, that's the main idea of the paragraph, that's the goal of the paragraph.
So, we have to kinda keep everything focused on that main goal.
And again, that may mean stripping out some extra details that don't contribute
to that main goal. Then, there's some sub-points to that,
right? So, asking the question, were the perfume
concentrations in the experiment appropriate?
Well, here's some things to think about related directly to that question.
So, one thing that's a very important point to make is that if the concentration
is too high, you might get a smell that is so overpowering that everybody rates it as
of poor quality cuz it's too overpowering and intense for everyone.
So, that will now allow you to get enough variation in your ratings to be able to
correlate with any, genetic, makeup. And, they say, well, if that were the
case, that's going to be a problem. But, in fact, we standardized the
intensity here so we felt, feel pretty comfortable we didn't have any sense that
we're simply just too overpowering or too intense.
So, that answer that particular question. Another thing they need to think about in
terms of the perfume concentration, another potential problem, is that
remember, they were trying to correlate people's preferences for the perfumes with
their genetic makeup. Well, if everybody rated the perfumes
exactly the same as if there was no variation in the preferences, then you
wouldn't be able to correlate that with genetic variation.
So, they are saying in their paragraph that, you know, the one way to kind of.
Whether or not the concentrations are appropriate, is simply if they have enough
variability in their quality ratings, that's a good indication that, that was
the right concentration. It's, at least, good for the experiment
because they can get enough variation to potentially correlate with genetic makeup.
And they tell you that, that was true for most of the sense.
In the experiment, they had good variarability in the quality ratings,
except there were two sense from which that wasn't the case.
The one that got the very highest ratings and the one that got the very lowest
ratings. Both of those were a little bit, you know,
didn't have very much variability, maybe because everybody really liked them or
everybody really hated them. But, potentially, it could have something
of the concentrations that they chose. So, this is really everything that was
going on in that paragraph. And then, the goal of editing is going to
be to kind of bring out all those main ideas in simple language, get rid of
everything that doesn't contribute to those main ideas.
And then, of course, while I'm editing the paragraph, I'm also going to, to be doing
sentence level editing, not only fixing the organization of the paragraph, but
also making the sentences read nicely. So, here's the overall edit that I came up
with. I got it down to 91, 93 words, actually.
So, I cut it down by more than half. So, I started with, perfume quality and
intensity may be negatively correlated. And I kinda stuck with this little
stylistic thing that the authors have of, of giving the little common sense message
in the parentheses. So, If a scent is too strong, most people
will reject it, independent of their preference.
Hence, I kept one or I kept two transition words here, hence, we chose the final
concentration of each perfume ingredient so that at similar intesity to a reference
scent. So, they're saying, okay, we guarded
against the fact that you might get over powered by making sure that there was a,
there were none of them were over powering cuz they were all standardized against a
reference. The resulting concentrations appeared
appropriate for most sense. And, we can verify that because the
participants' preference is varied along the sliding scale between zero and ten.
However, people largely agreed on the quality of Bergamot and Vetiver, and so
lower or higher concentrations may have be needed for these scents.
So, with that, with that exception, we did a pretty good job.
So, you can see, I've captured all of the things that I set out in this paragraph
and got rid of everything that didn't contribute to getting those ideas across.
The preceding program is copyrighted by the Board of Trustees of the Leland
Standford Junior University. Please visit us at med.stanford.edu.