154 Improve your Communication Skills
Creating effective paragraphs
Paragraphs display the shape of your thinking. They show the
individual main ideas and the relationships between them. Every
time
you take a step, alter your point of view or change direction,
you should start a new paragraph.
Use a topic sentence at the start of each paragraph to
summarise it. Topic sentences help you
to decide what to include
in each paragraph. You can think of a topic sentence as the
paragraph’s message. It should:
• be a fully grammatical sentence;
• make a single point;
• contain no more than 15 words;
• say something new.
An outline, of course, is a ready source of topic sentences.
Another place to look for potential topic sentences is at the end
of a paragraph. Very often we put the
most important idea as the
paragraph’s conclusion. Try flipping that conclusion to the start
of the paragraph as a topic sentence. Topic sentences should
make sense in order. You should be
able to read all the topic
sentences and understand a section in summary.
Editing a paragraph
To minimise potential downtime and operational risk, it is
recommended that the business
case for the purchase of a
back-up server, which could also be used for system testing, be
formally examined. We are now addressing this since a decision
is needed by the end of March to avoid
additional hire costs or
the loss of the rented machine.
Note how a topic sentence allows the writer to cut down
the paragraph considerably and improve readability.
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