ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Undermine a premise immediately

Sometimes, you may not need to elaborate on the premise you intend to debunk, allowing you to attack it immediately.

But capital gains are special, the engines of entrepreneurship and growth. No. There is nothing special about capital gains. Simple accounting alchemy can turn almost any form of income into a capital gain, and will do so if the tax rate is different enough. Capital gains are often—but not always—the reward for risk taking, whereas dividends and interest are usually the payoff of safer investments. And risk taking is swell. But the market will reward a higher risk with a higher payoff—if the risk makes sense, and if you believe in the market.

The point is well taken; it is also misleading. The issue is not the difficulty of writing but the fetishizing of difficulty, the belief that fractured English, name dropping, and abstractions guarantee profundity, professionalization, and subversion. With this belief comes the counter-belief: lucidity implies banality, amateurism, capitalism, and conservatism.

Undermining immediately is more abrupt than undermining at the end. Its quick shift can also be used as a transition between paragraphs (see Link your paragraphs).

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