The Writing Brain
University of Exeter

Sacks and Arrows

One of the greatest difficulties in crafting a good essay is maintaining focus. I like to say that a writer’s primary job is to hold the reader’s attention for as long as they want it, because a distracted or confused reader will not be able to hold the writer’s argument in their head. If you don’t have an attentive reader, it doesn’t make a difference how good your argument is: your reader won’t be able to follow it.

One of the most common ways to lose readerly attention is by overstuffing your paragraphs. We all understand that a paragraph has a point, and that it should prove that point, but it’s often difficult to know where one topic stops and another begins, or to know what it really means to prove a point.

In order to help with that, I want to start with a metaphor.

Here is a sack:

And here is an arrow:

Now imagine putting that arrow in a bow and shooting it toward a target. You’re probably imagining something like this:

Now, instead, imagine picking up that sack and trying to throw it at a target. The sack wouldn’t go very far. It would be too heavy, and it wouldn’t be streamlined enough. As a result, it would fall to the ground with a thud without ever getting near the target.

In this metaphor, the target is the point you’re trying to make, and sack and arrow are potential paragraphs. A paragraph that’s stuffed full of unnecessary information is too heavy and awkward to make the point. A streamlined paragraph will hit the point cleanly.

Look at this paragraph:

The structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets is very important. Each sonnet is written in twelve lines rhyming alternately (ABABCDCD…), with two final lines rhyming as a couplet. The lines of the sonnets are in iambic pentameter, which is ten unstressed syllables alternating with ten stressed syllables. Eric Grower has called iambic pentameter “the poetic rhythm of the human heart.” The alternate rhyming lines of Shakespeare’s sonnets mean that while an idea can be dealt with in two lines, it can also be considered over four lines, or set out in four and then contradicted in the four that follow. Unlike in a Petrarchan sonnet, with its contained octet and sestet, the structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets is elastic and intellectually pliable.

This paragraph contains a lot of information. If you look closely, however, you’ll see that a great deal of that information isn’t really relevant to the point. The paragraph’s topic sentence is “The structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets is very important.”  If we cut out the sentences that don’t relate to that point, the paragraph would look like this:

The structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets is very important. Each sonnet has twelve lines rhyming alternately (ABABCDCD…), with two final lines rhyming as a couplet. The lines of the sonnets are in iambic pentameter, which is ten unstressed syllables alternating with ten stressed syllables. Eric Grower has called iambic pentameter “the poetic rhythm of the human heart.” The alternate rhyming lines of Shakespeare’s sonnets mean that while an idea can be dealt with in two lines, it can also be considered over four lines, or set out in four and then contradicted in the four that follow. Unlike in a Petrarchan sonnet, with its contained octet and sestet, the structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets is elastic and intellectually pliable.

The first version of the paragraph is a sack: it’s stuffed with information that isn’t relevant to the point, and as a result it wanders around a bit before it gets around to heading toward the target. This wandering around confuses the reader – Is the paragraph going to be about sonnet structure or about iambic pentameter? What does Petrarch have to do with it?  – which makes the paragraph ineffective.

This second version of the paragraph is an arrow:

The structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets is very important. Each sonnet has twelve lines rhyming alternately (ABABCDCD…), with two final lines rhyming as a couplet. The alternate rhyming lines mean that while an idea can be dealt with in two lines, it can also be considered over four lines, or set out in four and then contradicted in the four that follow. The structure is elastic and intellectually pliable.

There is nothing there to confuse the reader. It states its point and then, like an arrow, it heads straight ahead and proves that point.

The thing about arrows is, they fly best when they are most unencumbered. This arrow, for example

might make it to the target, but it will take a while to get there, and it probably won’t hit the bullseye.

You therefore want the sleekest paragraph – the sleekest arrow – possible.

The way to achieve paragraphs that are arrows is to go through your paragraphs asking yourself if each piece of information you’ve included is necessary to make the point you’re trying to make (another way to think of this might be, Ask yourself if everything you’ve included is relevant to the point – not to the topic, but to the point). If a piece of information is not necessary/relevant to the point, cut it.

A further note:

Introductions seem to suffer from “sackdom” more frequently than other paragraphs. This may be because it feels as if we need to introduce everything in an introduction: not just the thesis of the essay, but also all historical background our reader may need, some secondary quotations to give our reader a sense of the critical background or justify our project, relevant definitions. But you can and should give all those things in a second paragraph, after the intro.

If over-supplying is confusing for a reader in a body paragraph, imagine what it must be like in an intro. A reader has no idea what your essay is even going to be about, and they’re being hit with enormous amounts of information. They don’t know what’s pointing them toward the argument and what isn’t. Remember that an intro is supposed to tell your reader what you’re going to do. Information that doesn’t do that, or that makes that unclear, or that confuses the reader rather than making them comfortable, is probably better sunk into a second paragraph.

Consider, for example, this paragraph:

Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a mock-epic that makes fun of everything. Written between 1819 and 1824, Don Juan was published bit by bit over the course of those five years, ending abruptly with Byron’s death in Greece in 1824. Critics have argued that the poem is a satire of Byron’s earlier poetic hero, Childe Harold, with Arnold Johnson writing that “Juan is a Harold gone to seed” (15). The poem follows its title character as he grows from an innocent teenager to a more worldly young man, working his way through Eastern Europe and England as he does so. As this suggests, Juan’s maturity occurs in tandem with his travels, and the two activities are inextricably linked. In fact, this essay will argue, Don Juan becomes more cynical and knowing as he travels further from the Southern place of his birth, Spain, and towards the Northern nation of England.

Until it arrives at the thesis, this paragraph could be about the fact that Don Juan is a satirical mock-epic the way it  was published, or how it compares to Byron’s earlier poem. Your reader is confused, and a confused reader is an unhappy reader.

In contrast, this paragraph has a clear trajectory:

Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a mock-epic that makes fun of everything. The poem follows its title character as he grows from an innocent teenager to a more worldly young man, working his way through Eastern Europe and England as he does so. As this suggests, Juan’s maturity occurs in tandem with his travels. In fact, this essay will argue, Don Juan becomes more cynical and knowing as he travels further from the Southern place of his birth, Spain, and towards the Northern nation of England. In Don Juan, the move northward and the move away from naivety are inextricably linked.

Your reader isn’t waylaid by extraneous information. They feel secure, and they have a clear line through the paragraph. You have held their attention.

Practical Solutions:

If you can’t tell whether your paragraph has unnecessary information, or which information in your paragraph is unnecessary and which isn’t, try hitting return after each sentence, so that every sentence starts on a new line. Put the topic sentence/point of the paragraph first, then see if each sentence, when viewed separately, helps to prove the point. If it doesn’t, cut it.

If the approach above doesn’t work, do the reverse. Put each sentence on a separate line, as above. Take a fresh piece of paper and write the topic sentence of the paragraph at the top. Then go through the sentences and transfer those that relate to the topic sentence to the fresh piece. Make sure they’re in order, so you have a coherent paragraph. Whatever sentences are left over at the end should be thrown away.

Pay careful attention to your introductory paragraphs if they’re long (more than a double-spaced page). Remember, an introductions should do only three things: Welcome your reader; Make you reader comfortable; Tell your reader what you’re going to do. If it does anything else, you’ve got yourself two or more paragraphs.

Learn to love the informative second paragraph. There’s nothing wrong with providing necessary background in a paragraph that follows the introduction.

Be Aware of These:

If a paragraph has no long quotations and is longer than one double-spaced page, there’s a chance it may be a sack. Check to see if there’s a natural cutting place (look for words such as “also,” “however,” “in addition,” and “furthermore” at the start of sentences mid-paragraph). If there isn’t, check to make sure every sentence you have is relevant.

In an essay you are allowed to take some things as axiomatic (that means, you are allowed to assume the reader knows certain things). If you are discussing a point, you don’t have to stop the discussion to tell your reader what a sonnet is, when Shakespeare lived, and so on. Try not to get caught up in the sense that you need to explain every single thing to your reader – that creates some serious sack paragraphs.

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