ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Start with a question and answer it immediately

Asking a question in the first line of a paragraph grabs readers' attention and sets up your point. Using an immediate, direct answer to make your point demonstrates a firm stance, emphasized by the confidence of a fragment.

Perhaps heightism is just a western cultural prejudice? Sadly not. In Chinese surveys, young women always rate stature high among qualifications for a future mate. Indeed, the prejudice appears to be universal.

So will squash eventually rival tennis as a spectator sport, and will Jansher Khan and Peter Marshall become as rich and famous as Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi? Almost certainly not. For all the gimmicks of a glasswalled court, a special white ball and more and better cameras, squash remains fearsomely difficult to televise. Not only does the ball move too fast but the camera lens foreshortens the action. Squash, therefore, is destined to remain a sport better played than watched. Given its propensity for what the tennis authorities term "audible obscenities", that may be just as well.

Immediate answers make you seem—merely seem—unequivocal. They also engage your readers with a conversational tone. And they don't leave the answer to the reader.

An indirect answer is less firm. In the next paragraph, the writer avoids offending anybody by slithering:

Can the euro still be stopped? In Germany, both a driving force behind a single European currency and home to the biggest contingent of sceptics, a last-minute bid to delay its introduction has drawn ridicule from the government. "I am as sure [the euro] will be launched as I am of hearing 'Amen' in church," said the foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel. Maybe, if he does not get caught in the traffic that is building up alarmingly en route.

The next paragraph also ends with a question, throwing the first point into doubt and providing a transition to the paragraph that follows it:

Why is Dylan [Thomas's] legacy so ambivalent? His reputation for being a drunk sits uneasily amid the Methodist chapels of South Wales. When Dylan's Bookshop opened in the town 25 years ago, old men would come in, stare at the first editions and other memorabilia, and exclaim: "I knew him, the bloody waster." But was it entirely true?

Whether answered directly or indirectly, questions bring your readers closer to the text by making them feel part of the discourse. Compare this point:

Our current system of teaching and learning is not very effective.

with this one:

How effective is our current system of teaching and learning? Not very.

A question and immediate answer can thus make a flat point more arresting.

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