Paragraph development in scientific and technical writing

Abstract

A paragraph is a grouping of sentences, a way of carving them up into connected sets so as to reduce the diversity of their thoughts to manageable proportions. Normally readers will expect a paragraph to have a single focus and one role since it is defined as a group of sentences developing a single idea, concept, thought, and topic. Overlong paragraphs, with too many sentences in them, have numerous drawbacks. The text becomes under organized and difficult to follow. However, paragraphs should not be too short. If paragraphs are reduced to just one or two sentences, then they cease to have this organizing rationale and become heteronymous cogs, turning as the argument progresses but not doing any useful work. For English-speaking readers, short paragraphs in technical writing will also make the text look disconnected, fragmented, and uncertain. A paragraph's pattern is important in making an argument look coherent and well organized because it is a unit of thought. In general, a paragraph should make one point, or one component part of a single broader point. Where a paragraph handles miscellaneous unconnected points, as it is sometimes necessary to round out an argument, this role should be explicitly signaled to readers because they will not expect it. The relationship between the ideas in an EST (English for Science and Technology) paragraph and between the items of information and the core generalization is expressed by several techniques. Sometimes the nature of the material the writer has available determines the applied technique, but at other times, the writer makes his own decisions as to the best way of presenting the relationships between his ideas. In the first case, we are dealing with natural techniques, and in the second, with logical techniques, and they are not mutually exclusive.