Authoring a PhD

Constructing paragraphs
The paragraph is a great art form. I’m very inter-
ested in paragraphs and I write paragraphs very,
very carefully.
Iris Murdoch
5
One thought alone occupies us: we cannot think
of two things at the same time.
Blaise Pascal
6
A paragraph is a unit of thought. In English writing, much
more than in many other languages, the pattern of paragraphs
is a very critical element in making an argument look coherent
and well organized. In general a paragraph should make one
point, or one component part of a single broader point. Where
a paragraph handles instead miscellaneous unconnected
points, as is sometimes necessary to round out an argument,
this role should be explicitly signalled to readers – because they
will not expect it. Normally readers will expect a paragraph to
have a single focus and one role. Overlong paragraphs, with too
many sentences in them, have numerous drawbacks. Your text
becomes underorganized and difficult to follow. And the inter-
nal focus of the paragraph becomes blurred, with too many 
different elements stuffed into a single bulging bag.
But paragraphs must not become too short either. A paragraph
is not a sentence. It is a grouping of sentences, a way of carving
them up into connected sets so as to reduce the diversity of
your thought to manageable proportions. If paragraphs reduce
to just one or two sentences, then they cease to have this organ-
izing rationale and become heteronomous cogs, turning as your
argument progresses but not doing any useful work. For
English-speaking readers, short paragraphs in academic work
will also make your work look bitty, fragmented and uncertain.
You will appear to be casting around for what to say, starting to
make points but then not properly developing them.
The optimal length for paragraphs varies a great deal from
one kind of writing to another. In journalism paragraphs will be
short, often around 50 words and never more than 100 words,
because newspapers and magazines are set in narrow columns.
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Read any book-form reprint of a journalist’s collected writings
and you will notice that these short paragraph lengths do not
work at all with larger pages. Instead the journalist’s text comes
across as far too chopped-up, with up to six or seven paragraphs
on each book page, and twelve or so on each double-page
spread. Professional academic work is always configured for
printing as books or journal articles. Here the printed page typ-
ically holds around 500 words. The ideal length for paragraphs
is one that divides each page several times, but not too freneti-
cally. A good aim point is hence around 150 words (half an A4
page printed double-spaced). But paragraph lengths of between
100 and 200 words (a third to two-thirds of an A4 page) are 
perfectly acceptable.
A good way to keep track of paragraph lengths is to make
sure that you can see each paragraph in its entirety on the
screen of your PC (using 1.5 or double spacing to make your
text easily readable). Where a paragraph goes appreciably
longer than a single screenful, consider whether it should be
split up. Where a paragraph occupies only a small part of your
screen, ask yourself whether it should be merged with the 
paragraph before or after it. Never leave very short (one- or two-
sentence) paragraphs hanging around, because they are disrup-
tive of the overall flow of the text. Always integrate them into
one or other of their neighbours.
The sequence of material within paragraphs should generally
follow the Topic, Body, Wrap formula. The first ‘topic’ sentence
makes clear what the paragraph addresses, what its focus is on.
The main ‘body’ of the paragraph comes next, giving reason-
ing, justification, elaboration, analysis or evidence. The final
‘wrap’ sentence makes clear the bottom-line message of the
paragraph, the conclusion you have reached. Readers will
always pay special attention to the opening, topic sentence of a
paragraph, to glean as economically as they can what it is
about. And they will also focus more on the last, wrap sentence,
trying to garner the guts of your argument without reading the
whole paragraph in detail. Many readers may only ‘eyeball’ the
‘body’ text, or will skim it in advance of detailed reading, in
effect deciding whether to read it and how intensively. Such
people may fasten on little else but the topic and wrap sen-
tences, which hence need to be written with especial care.
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Some PhD students bridle at this advice, arguing that it
would be wrong for them to adjust their writing pattern to
accommodate ‘lazy’ or non-serious readers of this kind. But it is
always an author’s job to maximize her readership and to con-
vey information accessibly. It is wise to bear in mind that read-
ers have very diverse needs, which they know best and which
authors cannot anticipate fully. Skim reading, for instance, is an
entirely rational strategy for all readers to adopt at some stage,
however serious-minded or committed to your topic they may
be. An author’s task is precisely to attract and retain skim read-
ers or ‘eyeballers’, and to convert them into intensive readers by
providing text which is as accessible and as interesting as pos-
sible. So as with chapters and with sections, the beginning
and end parts of paragraphs are crucial.
It is especially important that each topic sentence should
accurately characterize a paragraph and give readers a sense of
progression as they move on to that paragraph from its prede-
cessor. A very common problem occurs when authors instead
misplace the wrap sentence, so that it misleadingly appears 
as the topic sentence of the next paragraph. Here the author
uses the first sentence of paragraph Y to sum up the previous
paragraph X or to link back to it, instead of to launch Y out on
a distinctive point of its own. The effect is very off-putting and
misleading for readers, because it suggests that paragraph Y
focuses on exactly the same theme as X, rather than moving
the argument on.
Another very common bad paragraph beginning is to put
some other author’s name as the very first word, leading off
thus: ‘Smith (1997, p. 56) argues … ’. Sometimes even accom-
plished authors will construct a whole sequence of paragraphs
on ‘random author list’ lines, where every topic sentence starts
in this obvious and boring fashion. The implied message that
readers always get is not that you have read the literature but
that the paragraphs concerned are completely derivative, lack-
ing in all originality or value-added content, merely précising
someone else’s work. You should eliminate derivative-looking
paragraph starts wherever they occur in your text. Replace them
with topic sentences focusing on the substantive point of the
paragraph. Your text will also look more organized if instead of
reporting the views of individual authors you categorize them
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(accurately) into an appropriate school of thought. The paragraph
can then set out what that school of thought or intellectual posi-
tion stands for, and only cite the relevant authors in support of
this characterization. Where references are needed try always to
place them at the very end of sentences, preferably in the Harvard
format or by using endnotes (see next section). You may some-
times need to introduce the names of schools or authors into your
main text outside references, but do so sparingly.
The wrap sentences at the end of paragraphs are often easier
to write than the start, because you now have the paragraph
text to go on. But wrap sentences should not just reiterate what
has already been said. Readers are not goldfish. They will per-
fectly remember what you have written, especially when your
paragraphs are not too ponderous or too long. Instead the wrap
sentence should close the paragraph as a unit of thought, and
clinch or reinforce its main point. It should have at least a little
added value of its own. A last sentence is a good place to give a
more clear-cut evaluative judgement, or to assess the signifi-
cance of what has been established in the paragraph. It is a
chance for a wise author to draw together the phenomena cov-
ered in the paragraph as a whole (stand back and spot the shape
of the wood around here), rather than just itemizing details
(inspecting trees in close-up, one after another).