ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Start with a question and answer it in succeeding sentences

If the question defies a simple, straightforward answer, answer it in several sentences. You will still grab your audience's attention with an opening question but will reveal the answer more slowly.

This form works well for setting up a complicated or involved point, or for suggesting a point without stating it directly.

So why is the countryside booming? Agricultural growth accelerated in the 1980s; roads and electricity reached most villages in the 1980s, helping start new businesses in transport and construction as well as manufacturing. The spread of electricity has raised productivity in the countryside, as well as increasing rural demand for electrically driven gadgets. As electricity has spread television, so television has presented India's villagers with the joys of the consuming life.

So how can you tell if a Halls cough drop is too old? After two years, the cough drop begins to look cloudy, it becomes softer and stickier, loses shape and begins to "flow into the cracks and crevices" of its wrapper, a Warner-Lambert spokesman says. Though the drops essentially contain the properties of hard candy, the company says the lozenges lose their effectiveness after about two and a half years.

In both paragraphs, the opening questions give the reader a lens for focusing on the sentences that follow.

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