MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

First, begin by looking at this OWL PURDUE exhibit on useful transition words and phrases.  Back to paragraphs:  

• look at the last sentence of each paragraph; 
• then look at the first sentence in the next paragraph.

Do you see connection between content, including a reasonable pivot to new information?  The paragraphs, although they stand alone in topic and content, should CONNECT or TRANSITION with the surrounding paragraphs.  

Paragraph check: Ask

• What is the paragraph doing in the document?  What type of paragraph serves this purpose? For example, a narrative paragraph can tell a brief story or present a case or example.  An illustrative paragraph – cousin to descriptive paragraphs - paints a picture.
  
• Is the paragraph cohesive?  Does the content “hang” together?  Do the sentence choices achieve cohesion?  Look at the transition words and phrases in the OWL link above.  You can use them to achieve cohesion and flow between sentences. This focus is called local coherence, which is key to achieving flow.
  

Finally, paragraphs do not truly stand alone in most documents. Paragraphs combine to provide coherent content in a document for a reader.  Ask this:  do the paragraphs fit and support the arrangement or structure of the document?  Focus on transitions between paragraphs, which help with cohesion in the document.  Local coherence (within a paragraph) + global coherence (between paragraphs and within a document) create overall flow.

Cheap! Way To achieve cohesion between paragraphs try "chaining" by transitions. Place the  topic of the next paragraph in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph. The first sentence of the new paragraph must include that topic also. Doing this knits or binds the paragraphs to each other.  Here is how a math person would say this: 

Let ParaA be the preceding paragraph. 

Let ParaB be the following paragraph.  

Let T be the topic that should appear in both paragraphs.  

We will limit our discussion now to two sentences: 

• the last sentence of ParaA and the 
• first sentence of ParaB. 

In reality, ParaA and ParaB exist in a document with an arrangement of many paragraphs.

ParaA relates to ParaB through the last sentence of ParaA AND SIMULTANEOUSLY through the first sentence of ParaB. The relating elements is a topic, T;  T can be a repeated word or a phrase.  Some variation on T makes for good style.  Now, let's look at two real world documents that show two types of T: tight transitions and loose transitions.

Memo is due in hard copy on Friday, in class, double-spaced.  Here is a working checklist you can use.