Paragraph Organization and Development from Disciplinary Perspectives

        The paragraph below comes from a real news story.  The only change I made was to number the paragraphs to make it easier to discuss them as logical units.  The order they now are in makes perfect sense for journalism, where one leads with the most exciting/dramatic facts (the "who" and "what"), following with single-sentence paragraphs explaining the "why," "how," "where," and "when."  Tangentially interesting information is placed at the end, because that enables editors to quickly shorten a story to save page space by lopping off paragraphs from the bottom up.  I use it in English 104 to teach logical organization, asking small groups to reorder the paragraphs so that they would make sense to academic prose readers.  In English 105, when students have advanced further toward choosing majors and adopting the majors' disciplinary perspectives, they can be asked how their disciplines would develop specific single-sentence paragraphs by asking the questions that represent the major's ways of investigating the world.  First, decide on a proper order for the paragraphs from your discipline's perspective, omitting any that seem irrelevant and stating the reasons why they are irrelevant.  Second, focus on what questions your discipline would ask about the remaining paragraphs to develop them into a coherent analysis of the situation.

"Fish Eat Brazilian Fisherman"

Reuters News Service: Manaus, Brazil

1)  Man-eating piranha fish devoured fisherman Zeca Vicente when he tumbled into the water during a battle with 300 farmers for possession of an Amazon jungle lake.

2)  Vicente, a leader of a group of 30 fishermen, was eaten alive in minutes by shoals of the ferocious fish lurking in Lake Januaca.

3)  He died when the farmers--packed in an armada of small boats--attacked the fishermen with hunting rifles, knives, and bows and arrows after they refused to leave.

4)  The farmers, who claimed the fishermen were depleting the lake's fish stocks, one of their main sources of food, boarded the fishing vessels and destroyed cold storage installations.

5)  Last to give way was Vicente, who tried to cut down the farmers' leader with a knife.  But the farmers shot him and he fell wounded into the water, and into the jaws of the piranhas.

6)  Fifteen persons have been charged with the attack which caused Vicente's death and the injury of several other fishermen.

7)  Lake Januaca, about four hours from this Amazon River town by launch, is famous for its pirarucu and tucunare fish which are regarded as table delicacies.