Consistency, Parallelism, and Sentence Variety are Valuable Techniques - Essay Example

The techniques of paragraphing, parallelism and sentence variety that I learned will be elaborated on below. Techniques to create a consistent and concise essay, research paper, or other written document require special attention to be placed on the order of paragraphs and linking paragraphs. The order of paragraphs needs to be chronological with the importance emphasized with each sentence. Words and sentences should not be used unless they support the topic being discussed. Furthermore, to ensure consistency with the paragraphs more than the order is important, they also have to be linked. Linking paragraphs means keywords are repeated from one paragraph to another. It also means that transitional expressions and sentences are used. The thesis statement in this paper and the topic sentence of this paragraph show how keywords can link one paragraph to another with a transition.

Paragraphs are made up of words and sentences, which means that sentence variety helps create a transition between the various thoughts in a paper through language awareness. Sentence variety means I need to use a mixture of long and short sentences to explain my idea. The words need to be concise, exact, fresh and vary from the beginning. Discussing the use of words leads me to my next point with regard to parallelism.

Parallelism requires the same tense, voice, person, number and tone to be used throughout a paper (Thurman, 2008). In a sentence, I need to use the same verb tense. For example, washed, waxing, and vacuuming are not consistent. Washed and waxed are the same verb tense; however, vacuuming is a past progressive verb tense instead of a past tense verb. The tone created by verbs and words in a sentence also needs to be consistent. The tone is considered the expression of the speaker (Abrams, 1999). If the tone changes the meaning of the paper may change or lead to confusion on behalf of the reader.