Cohesion and Clarity
12- 6
Alzh eimer’s disease did not carry an APOE 4 allele, its negative predictive value in a symptomatic person is very limited. APOE 4 testing in asymptomatic persons has very poor positive and negative predictive values and should not be used. (From Nussbaum & Ellis, 2003) √ Connect the ideas within a paragraph in a clearly understandable order. A unified paragraph has a main idea, which is expressed in the topic sentence, and each sentence (or idea) in the paragraph should contribute to the discussion of that idea. To make the paragraph coherent and unified, however, the relationship among all the ideas must be clear, and the progression from each sentence to the next must be easy for readers to follow. Transitional words and phrases, which will be discussed later in this chapter, are very useful in guiding the reader through the text and in making the connections between ideas clear. Techniques such as using transitional phrases and repeating words are not effective, however, if the sentences being connected are not arranged in a logical order. Consider the following paragraph. Notice how smoothly each sentence flows into the next. The first sentence, in italics, is the topic sentence. As the paragraph progresses, certain words and phrases, in bold, are repeated to keep readers from losing their way. When it comes to adaptive immune responses to HIV, antibodies have received much of the attention — and caused unparalleled frustration and confusion. Antibodies typically derail viruses by binding to specific parts of their surface proteins , preventing the invaders from locking onto receptors on cell surfaces, the first step in establishing an infection . HIV long has befuddled AIDS vaccine developers because it overcomes almost every antibody that attaches to its surface protein , gp120. The central genius of the virus is that it copies rapidly and mutates frequently, creating a staggering number of viral strains . But over the years, researchers have fished a half-dozen antibodies from infected people that are remarkably potent — and work against many strains of the virus . (From Cohen, 2003)
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