How to Craft Compelling Paragraphs Using a Classic Writing Formula
Answering my students’ most common question: “how do I write better paragraphs?”
“How do I write better paragraphs?”
When I taught academic English to undergraduate and graduate students for several years, one of the questions students asked me most often was: “how do I write better paragraphs?”
Writing is hard, and I still grapple with how to write better paragraphs as a nonfiction writer every day. But the basic advice I give to students looking to write better paragraphs hasn’t changed much over the years.
Purpose-driven writers and aesthetics-driven writers
In nonfiction and academic writing especially, I generally see two kinds of paragraph writers: 1) those who use paragraphs for the purpose of conveying a single idea, and 2) those who use paragraphs to break up a long list of ideas based on what looks good on the page.
(Actually, in academia there’s also an all-too-common third group of writers: those who don’t care about either purpose or aesthetics and just write insanely long paragraphs that have no clear purpose and look bad. But I’ll just focus on the first two)
Those in the first camp tend to use paragraphs as a vehicle for packaging and delivering a single idea, with each new paragraph conveying a new idea or shifting the reader to a new focus of attention.
Those in the second camp tend to write in long chunks of writing, realizing afterward they should probably break up their prose a bit so readers aren’t confronted with a huge brick of text on each page. So they chop up their writing so it looks better.
I think both approaches have different advantages. In fact, I draw on both camp 1 (‘single idea’ approach) and camp 2 (breaking point approach) as I write. This is because, in practice, breaking single ideas into clean paragraphs can be tricky.
But as a starting point, I tell my writing students to become purpose-driven paragraph writers, using each new paragraph to package a new idea.
“But to do this well,” I say, “you need to ask yourself three fundamental questions about how your paragraph works”:
- How do I introduce the reader to a new idea in my paragraph?
- What are the ingredients I need in my paragraph to convey this new idea in a compelling way?
- How should I structure these ingredients to flow logically?
#1 How do I introduce the reader to a new idea in my paragraph?
This is where I tell my writing students about the wonders of the topic sentence. Topic sentences should be a writer’s best friend.
A topic sentence is the first ingredient of a paragraph (see #2 below for the other ingredients) and introduces the reader to a new idea or focus of attention.
Readers will look to the topic sentence first to see if they want to dig more into the rest of the paragraph, so crafting good topic sentences is key. As a useful formula to test whether you’ve written good topic sentences, I ask students to highlight the first sentence of each paragraph in their essay. If a reader could get a birds-eye understanding of the entire piece by just reading the topic sentences, this is a good sign your topic sentences are doing their job. This is also called reverse outlining and is a great revision strategy.
Also, topic sentences can be a great way to generate writing in the first place. For example, start building the paragraphs in your piece or essay by simply listing topic sentences or questions as writing prompts to fill in. This is a wonderful technique for getting past writer’s block.
Just construct a sentence/question for every new idea you want to cover, then extend those sentences into paragraphs, each paragraph functioning as a self-contained unit conveying a single idea.
#2 What are the ingredients I need in my paragraph to convey this new idea in a compelling way?
Dr. Patrick Dunleavy, in his Medium post on constructing good nonfiction paragraphs, writes that “In English the core building blocks of any intellectual or research argument are paragraphs. Each paragraph should be a single unit of thought, a discrete package of ideas composed of closely linked sentences.” These ‘closely linked sentences’ follow a basic formula:
- Topic Sentence (What’s the new focus of attention here?)
- Body/analysis (Tell me more)
- Tokens (Supporting evidence/examples)
- Wrap (Takeaway: so what?)
It’s not that this structure is set in stone. But when nonfiction writers don’t follow this formula, for example, by burying their topic sentence in the middle or by not wrapping up their paragraph with a takeaway, it risks leaving the reader confused, or worse, uninterested.
I’m a big fan of formulas that map out the key ingredients of a paragraph. There are other versions of this formula for paragraph writing, such as Pat Thomson’s ‘MEAL’ approach (main idea, evidence, analysis, link back/lead out).
I advise my students to start with this basic formula as a skeleton for their paragraph, and only after fleshing out the paragraph in creative and aesthetically appealing ways if they so choose.
#3 How should I structure these ingredients to flow logically?
Why are formulas like Dunleavy’s or Thomson’s so important when writing paragraphs? One reason is that readers naturally lean on such formulas to figure out what a writer is trying to tell them. As Dunleavy puts it,
“In search of the quickest possible appreciation of what is being said, they pay special attention to the beginning and ends of paragraphs, to the topic and wrap sentences — a technique commonly taught on ‘speed reading’ courses.”
Readers are constantly asking themselves whether the piece they’re reading is worth their time. If it is, they might commit to plodding through confusing or boring paragraphs because they believe it has an eventual payoff, or maybe it’s written by someone they admire. But most of the time, if a paragraph is not clear, readers will simply skip the paragraph, or stop reading altogether.
When readers are deciding whether to commit to a piece or not, they tend to search paragraphs for key information, sifting through topic sentences and wrap sentences of paragraphs. This is because readers are generally tuned into the basic logic of a paragraph: it starts with “what?”, and ends with “so what?” In other words, there is an intuitive understanding that the beginning of a paragraph introduces a new idea, and the end of paragraphs offers a takeaway.
Writers should strive to use this tendency of readers to their advantage. One way I recommend doing this is to harness the power of the Uneven U to construct your paragraphs on up to entire essays or even books as a “scalable formula.”
The Takeaway: Use Formulas + Reverse Engineer
Two takeaways: First, The advice I’ve given here is based on the view that each new paragraph should contain a new idea, and the skeleton of a paragraph should include four key ingredients: topic sentence, body, token, and wrap.
For many writers, formulaic approaches like this can seem stifling, but I find them liberating. Like a good outline template for a blog post or a book, they keep the ‘purpose’ of paragraphs front and center in our minds. But they also offer great springboards to break from formula too.
Second, to return to my students’ question I mentioned at the beginning — “how do I write better paragraphs?” — the best method I’ve found is, first, to consider the formula I mentioned above.
But another key strategy I recommend to my students is to reverse engineer the paragraphs of other writers they enjoy. This is the tactic science writer Ed Yong suggests to new science journalists coming up in the world: “Actively deconstruct the work of good journalists in an attempt to decipher and reverse-engineer what makes their writing sing.”
Beyond formulaic approaches to paragraph writing, learning how to reverse-engineer paragraphs I find compelling has proven to be one of the most powerful strategies I’ve found for crafting better paragraphs.
