One of the reasons I picked Old Information to New
Information as our Previously On concept this week is that it fits nicely into the new concept we are going
to learn: Paragraphing. This might not sound
like a new concept. You've no doubt heard
of paragraphs before, but what we're going to do is to think more strategically
about them. The materials do this in the
context of a legal brief. The approach, however, applies
to all kinds of writing, as does a bit of advice I often give students
who are trying to improve the way they
transition between paragraphs. The advice has two parts, the second of which borrows a bit from the American writer
Ernest Hemingway. The first part is, remember the principle of old
information to new information. Not only is it a good way to make sure your sentences
flow together, it is also a good way to make sure your paragraphs
flow together. The second part, the part that borrows a bit from
Ernest Hemingway, is this: fight the tendency to take a mental break after you've finished drafting a paragraph. Instead, at least try to start the first sentence
of the next paragraph. In 1958, Hemingway said in an interview with
The Paris Review that he would intentionally stop a writing session before he
ran out of things to say, the point being to pick up the next day right
where he left off, perhaps with some
built in momentum. "You write until you come to a place where you still
have your juice and know what will happen next
and you stop and try to live through until the next
day when you hit it again." The Colombian writer,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said of this suggestion, "I don't think any
more useful advice has ever been given
about writing. It is, no more and no less, the absolute remedy for the
most terrible specter of writers: the morning agony
of facing the blank page." So try it out, especially with this little twist of
applying it to paragraphs. I know finishing
a paragraph often feels like a good stopping point. But before you turn your
attention to something else, whether that be your e-mail, your phone, or a trip
to the fridge, take a shot at what that first sentence of the
next paragraph might be. Even if you change that
sentence the next day, you'll at least
have given yourself one of the best gifts anybody returning to a piece of
writing can get: a head start.