PARAGRAPHING AND COHERENCE

What is a (good) paragraph?

While you are considering your definition and criteria, look at these five paragraphs.

Which are good and which are not? Why?

1. The course through elementary school can vary considerably from child to child, and overall problems can range from mild and easily managed to severe and intractable, depending upon factors such as the child's intelligence level, appropriateness of management at school and parenting at home, temperamental style of the child, and the presence or absence of complicating factors such as hyperactivity/attentional problems, anxiety, learning problems, etc.

 

2. Myerscough (1994: 10) points out that Glasgow was the first ECC to 'adopt an all-encompassing definition of culture: "everything that makes Glasgow what it is: history, design, engineering, education, architecture, shipbuilding, religion and sport, as much as music, dance, visual arts, literature and the theatre".' While the U.K. tends to distinguish between culture (which includes art, music, literature and architecture) and heritage, other nationalities do not. As Bywater (1993) observes, the lack of clear and universally accepted definitions makes an assessment of trends in cultural tourism very difficult. Williams (1983: 87), argues that culture is one of the most complicated words in the English language, 'used for important concepts in distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.' In postmodern, post-industrial society the entire culture can be seen as dominated and determined by the leisure industry and tourism. Therefore there is great doubt over the usefulness of cultural tourism as a theoretical term yet its usefulness as a means of attracting visitors to urban sites seems unquestioned by local and national policy makers.

 

 

3. A potential investor may face difficulties in evaluating the true financial position of a floated company because many company reports are less than reliable. Although the Public Auditing Association issues standards intended to ensure all auditors give an objective opinion on whether a report presents the company's performance 'fairly', the system of sanctions seems to be inadequate. Evidence suggests that some auditors have been tempted to accept substantial bribes from plutocratic company bosses and then approve distorted reports. The maximum punishment for such malpractice is merely a two-year suspension, after which the convicted auditor can re-sit an examination and then return to work. There have been twenty-three suspensions of auditors since 1990; twelve of those convicted are operating freely again.

 

4. Hegel has been immensely influential, not least for bequeathing the dialectic and the division of history into a few great epochs to Marx. He was the son of a tax official in Stuttgart. While at the theological seminary at Tubingen, he became interested in the works of Rousseau and Kant. His Lectures on the Philosophy of History outline the developmental pattern of world history. He was worried by class divisions but did not see them as unbridgeable.

 

5. Salman Rushdie's essay 'Commonwealth literature does not exist', written in 1983, articulates a stage in the literary emergence and development of the (once - but no longer?) colonised, leading from the critical denigration and self-doubt of the term 'colonial literature'; through 'Commonwealth literature'; to the concept of 'post-colonial literature', which still acknowledges the colonial past as a defining presence; to the current precarious discovery of 'new literatures in English', in which the shift to the plural celebrates diversity. There have been no references to Commonwealth literatures, nor even to post-colonial literatures.

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