Paragraphs: stepping stones through your argument

When I’m talking with students about how paragraphs function within an argument I sometimes use the metaphor of stepping stones across or along a river. I like to offer a local image when I can. Last year, teaching at the University of the Free State in South Africa, I found some great pictures of the Orange River. This year, at a business conference at the University of Bath, I used photos of the River Avon (or the ‘Riv Raven’ as we West Country folk call it) to illustrate my point.

The metaphor is flexible. Sometimes the stepping stones/paragraphs take the reader across the flow of water – the raw material out of which the essay is created – to the far bank. Sometimes the reader will step from one paragraph to the next to follow the flow of the argument down the river to the sea.

Recently, my own writing has thrown up more river metaphors. I’m writing a biography of three people who were in Africa at the time of the Anglo–Boer War. It wasn’t until I was revising my first draft that I appreciated how important a role rivers play in their stories. One of my subjects writes about sabotaged rail bridges, and having to push train carriages one by one across a narrow wooden bridge built to take ox wagons. Another describes a river choked with human corpses and animal carcasses. Both of these, I realised, work as metaphors for various stages in my own laborious writing process.

The process always involves a struggle across broken bridges and through carcass-choked rivers to produce a seamless final draft, which appears as a sweeping onward flow or a clear path of dry stepping stones. This finished stage is illustrated by the third subject of my biography, who writes of the joy and exhilaration of paddling a canoe down a moonlit river in West Africa, swooping past the menacing tree- and liana-crowded banks on either side. Now that’s an image I’d like to find and share with students in my next workshop.