Editing Series: Paragraphs are Cheeseburgers, part 2
Over the next few weeks, I want to take you through the editing process. We’ve started with big picture items like conceptual work. Eventually, we’ll make our way into syntax and style.
We’ve discussed math, specifically the basic math of editing. We have discussed structure. Last week, we moved to another – particularly fragile – structure: the paragraph. Apologies to my fiction writers, this isn’t applicable to that genre. But, I know many of you dabble in the non-fiction arena, so stay tuned.
Let us rehearse the lessons you received regarding paragraphs. They should be one complete thought. They should have five to seven sentences. They should have a topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a conclusion sentence. These are all true. And, yet, if you’ve ever read anything published, you wonder where those rules went. Your familiarity with the rules – with most rules – means that you know the ABCs of rules. Rules can be abstracted, broken, and circumvented. In what follows, I’m going to finish giving you my little blueprint for paragraphs.
The paragraph is a cheeseburger.
The top bun is the transition from one thought to the next. The condiments function as contextualization. The cheese is evidence. The meat is the analysis. The bottom bun is a conclusion. Last week, I explained the first two and I will explain the last three this week.
Cheese – The cheese is closely related to the condiments in that it contextualizes the argument of the paragraph. After all, Swiss cheese gives you an entirely different culinary experience than cheddar or goat cheese. In terms of the paragraph, the cheese is best when it is just enough to taste, but not enough to overwhelm the paragraph. You need enough evidence for the analysis that follows. What’s more, the cheese must melt into the meat. Likewise, the evidence and the analysis must correspond. Your cheese can take several forms: quoted material, paraphrased material, or summary. That decision should be based on what best communicates your evidence. Regardless, the evidence must remain proportionate to the analysis provided.
Caveat: It is entirely possible to write hamburgers where the cheese is in a previous paragraph or easily referenced from a results section, graph, or table. Just be sure that you clarify what your evidence is. For folks who love a block quote, be sure that the analysis you have matches the amount of text you use. Otherwise, pare it down or use our oldest little trick: “X person’s ideas are worth quoting in full.”
In this section on cheese, I have focused more on amount rather than parts of speech. It is worth noting that cheese often relies on verbs of description with useful modifiers (adverbs or adjectives) because the evidence needs to be presented explicitly and, usually neutrally, as a way to create trust with a reader. You want your reader to understand you’re being fair to the evidence and other thinkers. But, if you’re not being fair, feel free to use the modifiers and verbs that showcase your opinion.
Meat – Ah! This is the hardest part of your paragraph to write. In my experience with student and faculty writers alike, the meat flusters a lot of writers because they can tell you that they need the analysis, but they cannot figure out how to make it happen. Here’s the deal: the analysis requires you to write with verbs and nouns so that you can demonstrate the relationships between ideas. So, you need verbs that have intensity and clarity. VVS verbs. Don’t fret. You can google “verbs for analysis” if you get stuck.
The analysis hinges on more than the verbs though. You want to be sure that you have something to say. Overall, your argument must have an opposition. This is easier if you’re arguing against a school/train of thought because you can have a clear “they say/I say” moment (cf. Graff and Birkenstein). Within the paragraphs, your paragraph must have a job. As I tell my students, none of your paragraphs should be unemployed. In other words, each of your paragraphs leads you toward a conclusion your generous but skeptical reader can believe. One of the ways to test this in editing is to do a reverse outline: go through the entire work and choose one sentence that represents what the paragraph is doing/arguing. Then read the sentences in order and see if it sounds convincing. This is time-consuming, but certainly worth it.
Bottom Bun – You know my students love to end their paragraphs with a change in grammatical mood. The four grammatical moods are declarative (sentences that state), interrogative (questions), imperative (commands), and subjunctive (hypotheticals or wishes). The students often believe that a change in grammatical mood helps close a conversation. They are partly right in that the change does indicate that one conversation or one part of a conversation is over. Unfortunately, a change in grammatical mood isn’t always the most sophisticated of options since rhetorical devices often announce themselves as unwelcome guests in writing. In addition, a change in grammatical mood can also open up a conversation, especially for interrogatives and subjunctives. I often experiment with this technique. I’d suggest you do the same.
My students have a good thought about this though. They want to wrap up the ideas in their paragraphs and bottom buns do their best work when they are succinct and have some degree of finality. One way of achieving that finality is to announce the thought in the paragraph has concluded with a change in grammatical mood or a summary. Another way to create a bottom bun is to take advantage of the natural conclusion of the meat/analysis portion. In some analyses, writers work their way to their impactful conclusion. For me, those sentences begin or end with adverbs or adverbial phrases: “as a result, this particular theory falls on its face with regard to inclusion;” “With regard to inclusion, this particular theory falls on its face as a result;” “Therefore…;” “And so it is: Holden Caulfield’s Madonna/whore conundrum once more.” You may note that last one sounds like sarcasm. Shifts in tone (sarcastic, hopeful, petty, innocent) and sentence fragments can work well. Even in academic writing.
Caveat: If you’ve ever eaten a cheeseburger in hunger, you’ll note that the bottom bun can sometimes get eaten or not do its job properly. This happens in paragraphs as well without ruining the paragraph experience. In writing, however, your task is to ensure that the disappearance of the bottom bun goes unnoticed because it is part of the meat or because the subsequent top bun is rapturously interesting.
I don’t think I can stress enough that the cheeseburger structure comes about during the editing process. It allows you to reverse engineer your ideas and your arguments. It also allows you to perform a series of checks and balances so that you’re clear about how and why your argument works. That said, if you are concerned about having these elements as you write, make it ugly. Do not be afraid to write “I transition here because..,” “The context is…,” “My evidence is…,” or “I argue that…” and go from there.
As always, there is a point where you do not necessarily know which end is up with your manuscript. That’s fine. That’s when you call me!