Reordering a Persuasive Paragraph
A student's paragraph on raising the minimum wage reads, in order: (1) "The minimum wage should rise to $15." (2) "In our county, 22% of workers earn under $12 an hour." (3) "A $15 wage would lift roughly 9,000 workers above the poverty line." (4) "Opponents say it will cost jobs." (5) "But studies of similar counties show minimal employment effects." (6) "Therefore the county should adopt $15." A peer says the paragraph "jumps around" and suggests moving sentence 1 to the end so the claim comes last. The student worries that without sentence 1 up front, readers won't know the point.
1. Evaluate the peer's suggestion. Does moving the claim to the end fix the paragraph's organization?
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Partly, but the peer has misdiagnosed the problem. The paragraph's issue isn't that the claim comes first-a claim-first structure is a perfectly sound organization for an argument. The issue is redundancy and sequence: sentence 6 restates sentence 1 almost verbatim, so the paragraph both opens and closes with the same claim, and the concession-rebuttal pair (4–5) sits awkwardly after the benefits (3) rather than before them. Moving sentence 1 to the end would create a single claim at the close, but it would also bury the thesis under data with no signposting, and it doesn't address the duplication. The student's worry is legitimate: readers benefit from knowing the claim early.
2. Propose a reordering and explain the logic that governs it.
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Sample order: 1 (claim) → 2 (local problem) → 4 (opponents' objection) → 5 (rebuttal) → 3 (benefit, now earned) → revised close that advances rather than repeats the claim (e.g., naming the vote or next step). Governing logic: state the claim, establish the local need, confront the strongest objection and answer it, then present the benefit as the payoff of a case that has already survived scrutiny, and close by moving forward rather than restating. The concession-rebuttal belongs before the benefit so the reader isn't asked to celebrate a proposal whose main objection hasn't been addressed; and the final sentence should add something new (an action, a stake) rather than echo sentence 1.