Opening paragraph: Provides context (and perhaps some background) for what you’re writing about

Thesis: Single sentence that establishes what the paper is about.

• Should be something a reasonable person can disagree with

• Generally appears near the end of the introduction
• If the thesis is taken out of the paper, the entire paper makes little to no sense
Transition sentence that links the opening/introductory paragraph to the following paragraph

What comes from all of this? For me, it is one question: where did this practice of silence come
from? As I mentioned a short time ago, there is no actual rule establishing my father’s military experience as
an off-limits topic, and no one in my family explicitly says, “Do not ask about this” with respect to it. His
time in the Army—except for a two-year span as an Army recruiter—has become effectively a “black box”
that opens only when either an outsider (someone not a family member) asks, or some government official
in an office somewhere consults the records of my father’s actions. [Final paragraph of a two-page
introduction]

Body paragraphs: Follow Claim, Evidence, Reasoning pattern

Claim: The topic sentence of the paragraph

• Must tie into and support the thesis

• Again, must be something a reasonable person can disagree with
Evidence: What supports the claim

• Drawn from either the text itself or literature (research studies, etc.)
• The best evidence is either directly from the text or written by experts in the area being
discussed
• Usually quoted or paraphrased; requires appropriate in-text citation
o MLA: (Street, 27)
o APA: (Street, 2021)
Reasoning: How the evidence backs up the claim
Don’t ever assume that the evidence speaks for itself: spell it out for the reader

Transition sentence that links the paragraphs together.

The articulation of silence (Bruneau, 2008) serves a dual purpose in the “maintaining of social order,
and in the control of others.” By ignoring the breach of an unspoken convention through silence, the
unacceptable mention of military service in any but the most general of terms is rejected, thus reinforcing
the established consensus, along with the social expectation of deference towards one’s elders that is so
often heard during childhood. Transgressors come to understand the taboos and mores that have been
established without explicit instruction in them. “We are what we say,” younger relatives come to
understand, “and we are also what we do not choose to speak of.” That is, both our act of speaking and our
act of remaining silent serve to define us in this context, making our behavior judged either acceptable or
unacceptable to the elders of the family based on how well we come to understand and utilize the embodied
speech practices that have been identified. [No transition sentence here because this point continues into
the next paragraph.]

[Repeat the CER pattern until you’ve said everything that you need to say (or the space/word requirement
allows)]

Conclusion: Restates the thesis and basic arguments made in the paper without repeating them word-for-
word
Try writing this without looking back at the paper to keep yourself from repeating what you’ve
already written. If you’re doing it in Word, write the conclusion in a separate document after you’ve
finished writing the paper.

Silence as a practice, in this case, involves the interaction of institutions and individuals, intersecting
and overlapping as the former influences the latter, and vice versa. What Bourdieu does not (or cannot)
address is the origin of practice beyond the subtle implications of Marx. Even then, Bourdieu’s references to
the dominant culture do not serve to meaningfully illuminate how practice arises and becomes habitus,
leaving these ideas as moving targets, meaning whatever they are operationally defined as meaning (within
certain boundaries), relying upon another’s conceptualization to bolster them to levels of meaning which
they may not fully possess. What makes an individual seems to be his practices and his habitus, Bourdieu tells
us. But what makes these practices, and what makes these habitii? We can impose all sorts of interpretations
on them, seeing them as a kind of enacted enforcement of societal (read as the dominant culture’s) norms,
yet the culture that shapes these things is left undefined.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the practice of silence is not that my family (among others)
has chosen to perpetuate a practice that we have come to embody without giving that notion much thought,
but that the theories to which we turn in order to make sense of these practices fail to adequately explain or
allow us to make sense of our actions by treating some parts of what we do as not worth mention or
explication. [Final two paragraphs of an eleven-paragraph conclusion.]
1. RUN SPELLCHECK/GRAMMAR CHECK
2. MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO CONTRACTIONS PRESENT
3. IF YOU’RE WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE, MAKE SURE YOU WRITE ABOUT IT AS IF
IT’S STILL HAPPENING

For example: “In Macbeth, the title character maintains that . . .”

“Ariel disregards her father’s instructions, believing that she knows better than
he does.”