How to Write Better Essays

Answer

Even so, stability in any society depends on there being a large pro-

portion of the community willing to obey these orders because they

have respect for official institutions, like the police. When this fails

we may be left with a very volatile situation in which people feel

obliged to obey, simply out of fear for the consequences. For

example, if an ethnic community in an inner-city area feels that the

police are unfairly targeting them, in time they are likely to lose

respect for the institution and for the individual police officer, whose

only recourse thereafter is to implement the law by threats of force,

rather than by appeals to reason and justice.

In the next chapter

If a large part of paragraph writing is about travelling well, conclusions

are about arriving in style. As we’ll see in the next chapter, there are a

number of simple ways to ensure that your conclusion ties in with your

introduction, producing an essay that is cohesive, tightly argued and a

joy to read.

196 Writing

Practice exercise 17

Write the development and the evidence

Question

‘Authority amounts to no more than the possession of power.’

Discuss.

Having written the topic sentence for the first paragraph after the intro-

duction in the last practice exercise, now, with your topic sentence and

the notes for the plan in front of you, write the development and the evi-

dence of the paragraph.

Once you’ve done this, compare it with the answer below.

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