Avoiding fragmented paragraphs

I had a great question from a student asking what I meant by a paragraph being fragmented. Paragraphs are fragmented when there are a number of short paragraphs which don't develop our ideas well: short, punchy paragraphs without evidence is a journalistic style of writing (which you can read more about here and here).

Creating a paragraph is about developing our ideas through a process of building our argument, and that takes more than two lines. The argument components within a paragraph are called warrant, claim, reason, evidence and response (and now we can suddenly see why most paragraphs need five sentences or more). The simplest way of explaining this I can think of I explained here (Young, 2022).

Acts of Leadership: Writing good paragraphs In order to write good paragraphs in academic writing, there are some key components that we need to address. Inger Mewburn (2021) put out a blog post in December last year, drawing on the work of Booth et al (2016), highlighting a few hacks for PhD students writing their theses. www.samyoung.co.nz

However, I found another site which lays this out in a simpler manner as the topic sentence, the development, the example, and the summary, which can be found here (Academic English UK, 2022).

Academic Paragraphing - how to write an academic paragraph A basic paragraph should consist of four key parts. 1) Topic Sentence (sometimes called a paragraph leader). 2) Development (a detailed explanation of the topic. 3) Example (this can be data, stats, evidence, etc..). 4) Summary (summarise the ideas &/or evaluate how effective these are). academic-englishuk.com

However, the example immediately above has a 'Laundry List' in the green text, so here is the same paragraph with those sentences turned around and the citations at the close (and a closing citation for the paragraph; amended from Academic English UK, 2022):

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can generate a positive reputation for a company leading to possibly more sales and growth. A corporation that invests in the environmental and ethical approaches of CSR will demonstrate to the public and the media that they are a responsible company (Jones, 2019). This improves consumer sales as customers tend to support ethical green business practice thus improving profitability and encouraging growth (Watson, 2018). For example, a yoghurt company called Yeo Valley has been investing in making its products organic, creating fully recyclable packaging and reducing its C02 output. As a result, profits have doubled within the last two years providing the company with a range of opportunities to expand (Peterson, 2019). Overall, the evidence seems to suggest that investing in CSR can improve brand image and productivity (Peterson, 2019; Watson, 2018).

There is a clear pattern in academic writing which we don't necessarily see at the outset.

Sam

References:

Academic English UK. (2022). Academic Paragraphing. https://academic-englishuk.com/paragraphing/

Young, S. (2022). Writing good paragraphs. http://www.samyoung.co.nz/2022/04/writing-good-paragraphs.html