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.A paper needs to have shape as well as direction. A bulge will develop
if you let a minor point get out of control and take up more space than
it deserves. Good proportions depend on your own sense of the relative
significance of your separate ideas about your subject, modified by your
sense of the needs of your audience. If your readers are unfamiliar with
the subject, spend time breaking ground. If they’re likely to reject one
of your ideas, pile up evidence at that point. If your discussion has been
complicated, be especially careful to pull things together at the end.
Proportion is related to emphasis. What deserves most emphasis usually gets most space. Position can provide emphasis, too: beginnings and endings offer major opportumties. Beginnings can arouse curiosity and over come resistance, and endings—of sentences and paragraphs as well as of whole papers — can serve as cinchers. If you use a comparison to prove that one product is superior to another, put its strongest claim either at the beginning or at the end — the beginning if you sense initial resistance, otherwise the end for climax. Failures in proportion and loss of emphasis often result from writing by association and from excessive qualifying. Associational thinking may be a great help in prewriting (writer in search of’ a topic) and in early drafts. One idea, or image, or word can remind you of another. At this early stage you aren’t selective. You pursue your subject through related pictures in your mind or through the con notations of the words you’re setting down — even through puns and other kinds of word play. You’re hospitable to all ideas. Approaching a subject this way helps get you into a first draft. But a paper isn’t a duffel bag. You can’t stuff everything into it. At some point you’ve got to select and shape. Otherwise you’ll never focus on a single theme. As your real topic comes clear, you’ve got to throw out the extraneous material that associational thinking produced and distribute the relevant material with attention to proportion and emphasis. Most of us don’t do enough qualifying when we write. We generalize about “people,” “men,” “women,” “students,” and so on, without a “some” or a “many” or a “most” to indicate that our statements aren’t all-inclusive. As you strive for accuracy and truth in what you write, you’ll need to qualify some of your generalizations, take note of exceptions, ward off unwarranted inferences. Simply adding “based on my own experience” or words to that effect will often make acceptable a statement that readers might otherwise reject: “On the basis of my own experience, I’d say that women bosses are harder on women employees than men bosses are.” In some rhetorical situations you’ll want to establish yourself as a person of moderation, not given to extremes either in the ideas you advance or in the tone of your discourse; and so you’ll qualify and temper your remarks. All this is reason able, often admirable. But don’t carry it so far that you weaken your organization and deaden your style. There are always exceptions if you hunt for them hard enough (just about every statement on writing in this guide could be qualified); but introducing them when they have little point or significance can damage your paper in a half-dozen different ways. top of page Home Similar Articles |