Yesterday, we had a writing lecture which taught us the organization of the paragraph called the ‘Burgergraph’. The model seemed to be a little naive. And the same things had been showed on the screen again and again so that I could even recite the paragraph.
Anyway, it’s really a new and interesting model though it may tell the same things that we had already learnt in China. It told that the paragraph should be like a hamburger which contains the buns and tomato, meat, and lettuce. The top of the bun is the main point of the paragraph. Tomato is to establish the evidence that tell the reader who said this point and where is it from. The meat is the quotation you cite as evidence. The lettuce is to explain the evidence. The bottom of the bun is to relate the evidence to the claim. That is how the evidence presented in this paragraph support its main point.
It sounds a little ridiculous to me. I couldn’t find any logic in this metaphor. The main parts of a paragraph should have some correlation, but I could not find any correlation among the tomato, meat and lettuce. It may confuse me more rather than make me clear about the structure. I think there may be a kind of culture gap between us.
What’s more, the organization requires us to list our main point in the first part, which means we should say our point directly. It is different from our Chinese composition. This kind of writing style is actually belonged to our writing styles. We call it ‘Kai Men Jian Shan’, the surface meaning of which is that you could see the hill as soon as you open the door, and also means say something directly. But most of our students would like to talk about something indirectly. It may because of the euphemism that rooted in our culture deeply. It also can be proved in our writing style. When we write an article, in the first part, we would like to talk a kind of event or phenomenon which may have some correlation with the main point what we are going to talk. And this may take up a large part of the paragraph. Then we begin to cite the point that showed in the phenomenon and prove the main point. But I know this kind of writing style may be not good for English essay which I had been told by our English teacher. The readers would like to read some articles that show the point more clearly and directly.