This activity can help when you have a paragraph that you believe is out of balance (something you might have noticed if you did the full project evidence/explanation balance activity).

Part 1: Highlighting

Using the highlighting feature in your word processor or actual highlighters on print versions, do the following:

1. Highlight or otherwise mark all the supporting evidence in the your paragraph.

• • From textual sources, this would include quotations and paraphrases, facts, examples, and background information. Include the attributive tags and citations in these highlights.
  • You can also do this with evidence from personal experience and observations or data that you have personally collected. These would be evidence in projects that don’t rely heavily on published sources.

2. Using a different color, highlight or otherwise mark differently all of the explanations of that evidence that you have provided. This material should all be coming from your own ideas.
3. Be sure that you have highlighted every sentence in the body of your paragraph. Note: You may have sentences that are part evidence and part explanation. That is perfectly fine.

Part 2: Analyzing Your Balance

Your focus here is a bit different from the earlier balancing activity where you examined the balance in your entire paper. Here you are looking for large-ish blocks of one color or the other in a single paragraph, usually three or more sentences. Those blocks are potential problem spots.

• Blocks of evidence can indicate the need for more explanation. While sometimes you will spend the majority of a paragraph providing a summary or an extended example from a source, much more often, you will want to present a little evidence (perhaps a sentence or two) and then explain how that evidence relates to your thesis or your point in that paragraph.
• Blocks of explanation can indicate the need for more evidence. Work through your sentences and determine whether a skeptical reader (one who doesn’t automatically agree with you) would be inclined to ask “How do you know?” If you find any of those moments, look for evidence you can bring in to support your point.

Don’t assume that you need to make a change every time you have one of these blocks, particularly when the blocks are explaining one of your points. Sometimes, these larger blocks are necessary.

This activity can work well when you have a paragraph that feels jumbled or jumpy. It may be all on the same topic (so it may pass the focus test), but it still isn’t connecting well from point to point.

This exercise can be done on a computer, but it is probably easier to draw the map on a piece of paper.

Here, I’ll use an example paragraph:

(1) The technology barrier is what humanity will need to work on. (2) Even if we could convince everyone to pay the enormous prices of installation and switch to clean energy, we still would not have the technology to support this substantial change. (3) Nevshehir states that the technology that we have today is still expensive and not powerful enough compared with what fossil fuels deliver. (4) Fossil fuels have one major advantage over renewable resources: Oil-based fuels are stable and predictable. (5) On the other hand, solar and wind electricity production can vary, which can leave people’s homes vulnerable to energy shortages. (6) Moradiya brings another barrier into the technology issue when he states “Although the development of a coal plant requires about $6 per megawatt, it is known that wind and solar power plants also required high investment. In addition to this, storage systems of the generated energy are expensive and represent a challenge in terms of megawatt production.” (7) In these sentences, Moradiya shows that in addition to the costs of installing the power generators (e.g., solar panels and wind turbines), the costs to store excess energy can be a major hurdle, since the technology that we have today makes large batteries that could sustain cities expensive.

Works Cited

Moradiya, Meet A. “The Challenges Renewable Energy Sources Face.” AZoCleantech, 11 Jan. 2019, www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=836.

Nevshehir, Noel. “These Are the Biggest Hurdles On The Path to Clean Energy.” World Economic Forum, 19 Feb. 2021, www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/heres-why-geopolitics-could-hamper-the-energy-transition/.

Part 1: Create the Map

1. Number all the sentences in your paragraph. Notice that sentences in a quotation are considered all part of one sentence (sentence 6 in the example).
2. For each sentence after the first one, draw lines to indicate which sentence that one logically follows from. Looking at the topic of each sentence can help.

• • Use solid lines to indicate a clear logical connection between sentences.
  • Use dashed/dotted lines to indicate a connection that isn’t as clear or strong as it could be.
  • It is possible that a sentence may connect to more than one sentence.
  • Sentences that are disconnected from all of the others in the paragraph should have no lines.

To the right, you’ll see a map of the paragraph above. In this map, sentence 1 is only loosely connected to 2. Sentences 2 and 3 are solidly connected and sentences 6 and 7 are solidly connected to each other and to sentence 3. Sentences 4 and 5, however, are connected to each other, but not to the rest of the map.

Part 2: Analyze the Map

Once you have created the map, you can use it to identify and correct trouble spots.

• Here are some of the most common problems:
  • Sentences that aren’t connected to any others in paragraph (sentences 4 and 5 in the diagram). These usually indicate a sentence or group of sentences that belong in another paragraph. I see this most frequently with transition sentences that appear at the end of a paragraph instead of the beginning of the next. I also see this with ideas that need more explanation, sometimes in a separate paragraph.
  • Sentences connected by dashed/dotted lines (sentences 1 and 2 in the diagram). These sentences probably belong together, but the logic between isn’t as clear as it needs to be for the reader to follow. These connections can often be strengthened by adding a little more explanation to one of the two sentences—or sometimes in a sentence between them.
  • Sentences whose connection jumps over sentences (sentences 3 and 6 in the diagram, which skip over sentences 4 and 5). Usually, this means that the sentences are out of order. Try moving the sentences so that those that are connected on your map are next to each other. You may have to adjust the wording of the sentences, including transitions, as you do this.
• Not everything in a map is necessarily a problem:
  • A single sentence with multiple sentences connected to it (sentence 3 in the diagram). This probably indicates an important sentence for helping your reader understand the relationships among the ideas in your paragraph. Usually, these don’t need any revision—at least not because of this.
  • A late sentence that comes back to an early sentence in your paragraph (not seen in this diagram). This is often a way of either wrapping up an explanation and making the connection clear to your reader or starting a new explanation from a key central sentence in the paragraph. Usually, these don’t need any revision.
  • Long chains of sentences in the same paragraph (not seen in this diagram). These may be a problem if your paragraph is very long. Look at whether one or more of those chains should be turned into a separate paragraph.

The first part of this activity can be more effective with a partner who knows the assignment but who isn’t familiar with your paper, but you can do this with someone who doesn’t know the assignment, or you can do it for yourself as long as you have given yourself enough time to come back to your paper as a reader.

Part 1: Thesis and Content Work (done by a partner, ideally)

Use the highlighter feature in your word processor or an actual highlighter on paper to do the following (be sure to set up a key to the color-coding):

1. Analyze the introduction:

• • Highlight the sentence you believe is the thesis statement.
  • If there is more than one sentence that you believe could be the thesis or that you think need to be together to make the thesis, make a note of the issue.

2. Analyze the conclusion:

• • Highlight/mark the restated thesis in the same color as you did the thesis in the introduction.
  • Highlight/mark (in another color) any other sentences that seem to be summarizing the paper.
  • Highlight/mark the gesture forward in a third color, and identify which approach you think the author is using in that gesture. Information about possible gestures appears in the conclusions section.
  • Make note of any suggestions you have for strengthening the conclusion.

3. Make a list of what you expect to see in the paper-based just on the introduction and conclusion:

• • Add a few spaces between the introduction and the conclusion paragraphs.
  • In the space you have created, make a list of the topics you expect the author to cover, based on what you see in the introduction and conclusion.

Part 2: Reviewing the Feedback (done by the author)

1. Look at the highlighting of the thesis in your introduction. If the identified sentence was not what you thought your thesis was, think about whether and how to revise it so that it is clearer.
2. Look at the highlighting of the restated thesis. If the identified sentence was not what you thought your restated thesis was, think about whether and how to revise it so that it is clearer.
3. Compare the two statements of the thesis. Are they making essentially the same claim? Are they using distinct phrasing? You want both of these answers to be “yes.”
4. Look at any additional summary that was highlighted in the conclusion. Try deleting that summary. Remember that the reader of a college-level paper is expecting a gesture forward, not a recap, unless the paper is long (more than about 2000 words).
5. Look at the material marked as your gesture forward. Was this material identified in the way you had intended? If not, what could you do to make it clearer?
6. Look at the list of topics that your partner thinks would be covered in this paper. Make note of any that differ from your actual organization. Significant differences could signal a need to return to global revision.

Once you have looked at all of these aspects of the feedback you have received, ask your partner about any of his/her feedback that you don’t understand. Then, write up notes on what, if anything, you are going to change and what you are not going to change based on this feedback.

To make sure that your transition sentences are doing the work you want, do the following for each paragraph after the introduction:

1. Identify the transition sentence. Remember that this will almost always be the first sentence of the paragraph.
2. Check the gesture backward. Does the sentence give your reader some information that they already know from the previous paragraph(s)? It can sometimes help to highlight this part of the transition sentence to make sure that you can identify it. These parts may include the following:

• • Repeated words, phrases, or even clauses from the previous paragraph
  • Transition words
  • Summaries of ideas previously discussed
  • A reminder of the thesis of the project or the main point of a section of the paper

3. Look at the remainder of the transition sentence. Is it providing some kind of gesture forward or introduction to new information?