ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Start with a question and answer it at the end

When you want to explore several possibilities or give reasons before answering a question, try putting the answer at the end of the paragraph. The effect is to make you seem thoughtful, thorough, cautious.

This kind of paragraph is similar to one that concludes with the point after introducing the subject (page 47). And here, too, be sure you don't lose your reader before arriving at your point—in this case, the answer to the opening question.

How many ideas—and how much fact—can a novel contain before it begins to turn into something else altogether-a work of non-fiction, for instance? Some famous examples spring to mind. The Napoleonic armies marched right the way through Tolstoy's epic "War and Peace" without protest from the author. One of the 18th century's best works of fiction, Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," was also one of the oddest novels ever written-part eccentric autobiography and part an examination of the nature of time. Closer to our own day, Norman Mailer fashioned his greatest novel, "The Executioner's Song," from the gruesome lineaments of a mass-murderer called Gary Gilmore. So how much can a novelist get away with? It entirely depends upon whether or not he can sustain our interest by sheer force of persuasive imaginative skill.

Why did the highly paid economists in the investment banks and the international financial institutions fail to predict the crisis? The IMF did issue several warnings to Thailand during the year before the collapse, but the government ignored it. The handful of economists who rang alarm bells, such as Jim Walker at Crédit Lyonnais and Mark McFarland at Peregrine Securities, were generally thought to be too gloomy.

In the first paragraph, the writer sets out three examples, restates the question, and then gives the answer to make the paragraph's point. In the second paragraph, the writer gives one answer immediately, undermines it, and concludes with the point, nicely sandwiching the supportive details.

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