Word: paragraphed
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...imagine this: a mainstream American movie, rife with violent and often murderous behavior, yet so densely plotted, so richly peopled, that you can't summarize it in a sentence. Or a paragraph. Or several of them. Imagine, as well, a film set in the exotic past--Los Angeles in the noirish '50s--that tends to make the mass audience skittish. And imagine too a cast of terrific actors that lacks the reassuring presence of a megastar who can, as they say, open a picture...
...airliner crashes in the first paragraph of a novel. The author, who, of course, has decreed the time and place of the crash as well as the passenger list, has a number of choices. Does he thread backward, exploring the chilly ironies of Fate's dice rolling? Forward, tracing a bizarre linkage of events unexpectedly tumbled into motion? Does he find sabotage, corporate greed, a pilot who memorized an eye chart he could no longer read...
...concluding sentence of the previous paragraph would serve well as the thesis for a perfect essay--which should always be the first sentence of the essay--since it is a logical deduction that can be proved by evidence. The reader will appreciate clarity and simplicity in both the thought and the vocabulary of the author of the essay. It is not that the reader is a stupid person but that he or she ought not to have to give extra thought to a statement if it might be put before him or her in a transparent fashion. Acuity of purpose...
Following the beginning of the essay is the middle of the essay, by which I refer to all of those (evenly worded) graphs which are necessary to lead the reader from one's introduction--itself requiring only a paragraph or, at most, two--to one's conclusion, which ought to be of similar length and breadth to one's introduction and ought to appear as a mirror image of its earlier self in determining exactly what was set out to prove. These middle paragraphs can be many or few, but they must be evenly numbered, and they must not confuse...
...advice from departments exited the Courses of Instruction and moved to a new publication, the Fields of Concentration, in the early 50s, about the time most course heads first submitted a descriptive paragraph for publication...