Shaping a Paragraph

When we want to explain something, we introduce the topic, present the pertinent facts, and show what conclusions can be drawn from our explanation. When we do this in writing, we are engaged in a kind of composition called expository prose, a fabric of language made up of many paragraphs quilted together to expose, or exhibit, our thinking about an idea.

There is nothing simple about thinking and writing clearly and methodically, and writers on writing, both classical and modern, have tried to put together systems whereby we can develop our paragraphs—which is to say our thinking—in a more regular manner. One such scheme, discussed in one classic writing manual entitled English Composition in Theory and Practice (Canby, et al., Macmillan, 1912), outlines four parts to developing a paragraph in expository prose. Each substantive paragraph, in theory, unfolds in up to four stages: proposing the topic, establishing it, applying it, and summarizing it. We might propose a topic by defining it; we might establish it by telling the reader what also is involved in the topic; we might apply it by showing what happens as a result of the topic; and should the topic be sufficiently complex, we might, for the reader’s convenience, conclude with a review of all we’ve just demonstrated.

Here’s an interesting illustration of this technique in developing a paragraph, interesting in particular because the writer accomplishes the first step by proposing his topic with a question. Erich Kahler was a twentieth-century German-American essayist and teacher who wrote insightfully, even presciently, on matters both cultural and philosophical. The first paragraph of the second chapter of his Out of the Labyrinth (Braziller, 1967) opens like this:

Let us start with a fundamental question: What is all our knowledge for? what is, or should be, the aim of our constant striving for more and more knowledge? It is good, indeed necessary, to ask this question from time to time lest we forget the ultimate end of our intellectual endeavors. Our intellectual activities have become so institutionalized and compartmentalized, and the problems in which we are involved have grown so overwhelmingly complex and besetting that we are apt to lose sight of this guiding aim.

Setting aside the urgent irony we might feel to compare the “overwhelmingly complex and besetting” world of 1967 to our contemporary—let’s just call them difficulties, we notice that this opening paragraph comprises three sentences, each of which, in order, meets this scheme to develop a paragraph (no fourth stage is necessary here because the topic is not overly complex, at least not yet in this first paragraph of the chapter). The initial sentence (still one sentence, even for all its internal punctuation) proposes the topic interrogatively in order to confront the reader directly with the problem. Its declarative form instead might have been it is important to understand the purpose of our increasing knowledge, or we should understand what we are after in accumulating more and more knowledge, both statements blander, almost bureaucratic, in tone from the author’s forceful rhetorical questions.

The second sentence also accords with the scheme. It establishes the problem of increasing knowledge by pointing to what that entails, namely, our forgetting the real purpose of all our mounting knowledge, what Kahler refers to as “the ultimate end of our intellectual endeavors.” That is to say, he expands the definition of knowledge to the intellect itself, a definition of mental effort that goes beyond simply technical, practical prowess. Finally, then, his third sentence warns of a consequence that might well result from our not understanding that real purpose of knowledge: we might just lose our way, our directing assumptions about life, in an ever more confusing world of our own making.

With this design, Kahler’s paragraph, then, has both order and poise, qualities which, built into the paragraph sentence by sentence, make a viable way for him to reach the reader with conviction and persuasion. It is an excellent example of both the classical principle that form, or shape, executes meaning, and the actual clarity that results from a method of paragraph construction carried out designedly—something indispensable to successful expository prose.

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