Just a Minute

Here’s a simple way of thinking about your competence as a scholarly writer. Each paragraph should require no more than a minute to convey an idea to a properly trained reader, i.e., a competent peer. Obviously, it is a minute within a particular context. So, when you are writing a paragraph for the middle of your paper, you are trying to convey an idea in one minute, but in the context of, say, nineteen ideas that have already been conveyed in the preceding nineteen minutes. It remains useful for you to think of each paragraph as as attempt to accomplish something in your reader’s mind using a single minute of the reader’s attention.

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