A Brief Outline of the Fourth Lecture

Today's Typing Lesson

Instructions for how to add vowels to Hebrew text can be found here.

Today's Writing Lesson

We now consider the introductory and concluding paragraphs. (See the Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers by L.Q. Troyka and D. Hesse for more information on this topic.)

When you write, you are trying to communicate something, and it is your job to do so as clearly as possible. You must shoulder the burden of making your essay as easy to follow as possible.

One of the ways you help a reader understand the flow of your ideas is to fit the ideas--as radical as they may be--into a standard format. Making sure that your essays begin with an introductory paragraph that is written in the usual fashion and end with a concluding paragraph that follows the standard format for such paragraphs will help your readers to follow what you are saying. The Introductory Paragraph

Most essays start with an introductory paragraph--a paragraph whose purpose is to tell the reader what the point of the essay is. Telling the reader what you are about to deal with makes it easier for the reader to follow the rest of your essay--and making the reader's life easier is what it is all about. The introductory paragraph is meant to ease the reader into the essay. It generally contains a sentence that describes the topic of the essay. (This sentence is often called the thesis statement.) It often contains an interesting fact or story related to the main point of the essay. See, for example, this article. The topic sentence is the next-to-last sentence of the first paragraph of the introduction. (For the purposes of this course, the abstract of an article does not count as part of the article.)

The Concluding Paragraph

In the concluding paragraph you generally pull together what you have said. Often you will "hit the high points" of your a essay a second time. If you have main points and subsidiary points, your conclusion may be one more place where you show your reader which points were main points. If you make sure that your concluding paragraph really does remind the reader of your main points, you will be doing the reader a great service as sometimes the reader is not sufficiently expert to know which of your points were main points and which were subsidiary points. (Once again--the importance of writing to your potential reader cannot be overemphasized.)

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