Example of a Paragraph

I mentioned this before, but it's important. If you look at "real" paragraphs written by real authors, it's often fairly hard to tell what "type of paragraph" a given paragraph is.

Let me take a random paragraph (this is from CS Lewis)

Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.

Just from being a reader you can probably pick out the main idea of the paragraph, and you can see that the paragraph is part of a longer essay. But what form does the paragraph take?

• Different sets of laws to which humans are subject.
• Physical laws -- can't disobey
• Biological laws -- can't disobey
• Human Laws -- those he has a choice about obeying.

It's basically a classification paragraph. It shows the types of laws under which humans operate. You probably see that it is heading towards the "moral law" and the Christian idea of free will.

(Though he does not mention it specifically, you can see that he was using a format similar to the Porphyrian Tree classification you just learned about in logic. )

But CS Lewis was probably not thinking "classification paragraph" when he wrote it. That is usually not how people think when they are writing -- their attention is on what they want to say. However, if they are thinking logically their thoughts will tend to follow the rules of logic, and their writing will fall into a pattern which reflects the way people think.

That's the end of the lesson!