Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing - Iain McGee
The Paragraph Break and Other Discourse-Managing Tools
Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing - Iain McGee
Iain McGee [+]
Majan University College
Iain McGee is an Associate Professor and Head of the Faculty of English Language Studies at Majan University College, Muscat, Oman. He completed his PhD from Cardiff University, UK, in 2006, and has published research in a number of areas within applied linguistics including collocation and the mental lexicon, lexical cohesion, data-driven learning and lexicography, teacher cognition, and paragraph analysis.
Description
This chapter examines the interaction between various discourse-managing tools that writers have at their disposal to help manage text. The author discusses, in detail, how paragraph-initial and paragraph-final language interact with the paragraph break, and how these interactions influence what the paragraph break is and does. It is argued that a multi-signaling approach to discourse management is necessary to understand the paragraph, an approach which does not consider the paragraph break in isolation but alongside its co-occurrence with other discourse-organizing signals and genre conventions.