ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Undermine a premise in the middle of a paragraph

Undermining a premise after you've given readers some background allows you to fit the whole process (state premise, support it, undermine it with a point, support point) into one paragraph. That, however, can make for long paragraphs.

Chroniclers of the rise of the industrial worker tend to highlight the violent episodes—especially the clashes between strikers and the police, as in America's Pullman strike. The reason is probably that the theoreticians and propagandists of socialism, anarchism, and communism—beginning with Marx and continuing to Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s—incessantly wrote and talked of "revolution" and "violence." Actually, the rise of the industrial worker was remarkably nonviolent. The enormous violence of this century—the world wars, ethnic cleansings, and so on—was all violence from above rather than violence from below; and it was unconnected with the transformation of society, whether the dwindling of farmers, the disappearance of domestic servants, or the rise of the industrial worker. In fact, no one even tries anymore to explain these great convulsions as part of the "crisis of capitalism," as was standard Marxist rhetoric only thirty years ago.

At first glance, it may seem absurd to propose that the cash visible in the capital is symptomatic of things getting better elsewhere across Russia. During the past four years industrial production has halved (America's fell by less than a third during the Depression). Government data, however, give cause for guarded optimism. The decline in industrial output may have bottomed out; output has been steady for the past three months; living standards have actually improved. According to Goskomstat, the official collector of statistics, real (i.e., adjusted for inflation) household incomes rose by 18% in the year to July, and real household consumption by 10%. There are also signs of changes in the pattern of consumption: imports of chicken and red meat rose from 90,000 tonnes in January to 399,000 tonnes in August. Critics of reform will complain that Russia cannot afford to live on imported food-yet, in the first eight months of this year, Russia had a trade surplus of 11.7 billion.

To break these paragraphs up, you could put all the supporting sentences into a separate paragraph.

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