Focus on verbs first.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but my students struggled to find where main verbs are in a sentence when they read. While it’s another thing talking about sentences/clauses/phrases, it is indeed necessary to break down a sentence into clauses, where the main verbs are, and exclude infinitives, gerunds and participles for a moment.

This is what I did with students in the class:

There are two reasons to tease out verbs first. The first point is that this allows us to understand what kind of verbs are dominantly used in a paragraph, talking about a specific topic.

In academic papers, the topics are in general the knowledge of the field (theories, concepts, definitions of technical terms, etc.) and the research of the field (other research activities, the writer’s own research). When one focuses on talking about her study (i.e. the paper itself), the kind of verb would usually that expressing “research actions”, such as “analyse”, “examine”, “illustrate”, “evaluate”, and many more that fall into the taxonomy of Bloom’s higher-order thinking skills.

The second reason for spotting main verbs first is that they can find the focus of the topic in a paragraph. Typically, the meaning occupying the Subject position is the topic of the sentence, or technically the “theme”. In an example I showed to my student, represented here, an effective paragraph would have the topic knowledge or their substitutes (e.g. pronouns, referential words, etc.) occupying the themes throughout.

But to identify the topical themes correctly, one must be able to find out where the main verbs are with a similar level of accuracy. Of course, being capable to do both also means that one can find out what the new information (“rheme”) is in each sentence of the paragraph. This will further help her understand how information flows from one sentence to another in order to maintain unity, or the big word — “cohesion”.