Get to the point I: Paragraph structure

Paragraph Structure

Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that acts as a thesis statement and summarizes your paragraph. If you are doing a literature review and summarizing other people's work, include the source that contains the information outlined in the paragraph. Use the active voice if possible.


Prefaces and Segues

A common mistake many students make in scientific and technical writing is to preface paragraphs containing important information about the atmosphere with unnecessary segues and prefaces:

 "Studies of hurricanes have shown that they are a dangerous phenomenon. They represent an important aspect of the tropical environment."

This may be okay in oral presentations, conversation, literary work,  personal diaries, and rants on blogs, but only wastes valuable space in technical reports and science papers. You want to make it as easy as possible for your reader to get the information they need to know.


References and example

It is good style to begin any paragraph with the main point. It is equally good style to begin the first sentence of the paragraph with the reference that backs up this point:

"Smith et al. (2010) showed that  hurricanes can cause significant amounts of damage when they strike populated areas. "
            
This forces you to use the active voice, makes it clear that you are presenting information from an authoritative source, and makes subsequent referencing unnecessary.

If you need to provide secondary references that add to the credibility of the information, this can be done with brackets:

"They used 6-hourly sea-level pressure fields from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (Kistler et al. 2001) for the years 1951-2000 to examine hurricane tracks in the North Atlantic Ocean. " 


This gives the reader information  they can use to assess the quality of the study and to reproduce the results if necessary.

 If the order of the above sentences were reversed, the paragraph is less clear because the secondary (albeit important) information appears first, and the main point of the paragraph second. Your reader will mumble under his breath "Get to the point".