Page 63 - English for Writing Research Papers

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3.9 Link each sentence by moving from general concepts
to increasingly more speciﬁ c concepts
A key issue when linking up sentences in a paragraph is to decide how to link one
sentence to the previous one. The following is an extract from the beginning of a
paragraph from a paper on pollution in soil. It fails to make a strong impact because
of its lack of logical progression between S3 and S4.

(S1) The soil is a major source of pollution . (S2) Millions of chemicals are released into
the environment and end up in the soil. (S3) The impact of most of these chemicals on
human health is still not fully known. (S4). In addition, in the soil there are naturally
occurring amounts of potentially toxic substances whose fate in the terrestrial environ-
ment is still poorly known .
S1 puts the soil as the topic of the sentence. S2 is more speciﬁc and talks about

the quantity of this pollution – millions of chemicals . S3 reports the impact of
the chemicals mentioned in S2. But S4 does not continue this logical progres-
sion from general to increasingly more speciﬁc. Instead, it begins by putting soil

in the topic position. This breaks the logical progression, because soil was the
topic of S1.

The following sentence would be a good replacement for S4 because it continues
the logical structure developed in S1–S3.

There are also naturally occurring amounts of potentially toxic substances in the soil whose
fate in the terrestrial environment is still poorly known.

The formula is thus:
1. S1: main topic ( soil ) introduces subtopic 1 ( pollution )
2. S2: subtopic 1 is speciﬁed by introducing subtopic 2 ( millions of chemicals ).

3. S3: subtopic 2 is speciﬁed by introducing subtopic 3 ( impact of these chemicals ).

4. S4: a further / related aspect of subtopic 3 is introduced via subtopic 4 ( impact of toxic

substances, i.e. chemicals, is poorly understood) .
5. etc.
Basically each sentence is a link in a chain. A full chain is a paragraph. And a series
of linked chains makes up a section.

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