i'm going to show you how to analyze a
paragraph and understand what you're
reading
this builds on some previous videos
about analyzing a sentence using grammar
so there are several types of text trees
that you can use when you're reading
and each one has a different node size a
note is one box or thing
in a tree
so for a sentence tree also called a
grammar tree
a typical node is one word
this time we're going to do a paragraph
tree a typical node is somewhere ranging
from a clause up to a sentence it takes
some judgment call about how much to
break up the sentences
there are also text trees for reading
larger amounts of text so you can have a
section text tree
based on paragraphs as nodes and then
you can have a chapter tree
where the nodes are sections and then
you can have a book tree where the nodes
are chapters
there is some flexibility on how you
break things up for example if a section
has too many paragraphs in it you can
use sub-sections or even
sub-sub-sections so you could have more
levels of different trees going from
words all the way up to the entire thing
that you're reading
sometimes authors don't use sections
if you find that you have too many
paragraphs
that are all in one section one article
or whatever then
you can add your own sections
if an author doesn't break things up
enough you can break it up yourself you
can decide
where would the author put section
breaks
if he was going to put them
and what would they be called and then
you can put them in yourself to help you
analyze what you're reading
similarly some authors write really long
paragraphs
so when you're doing a section tree
instead of a node being a paragraph you
might use half a paragraph as one node
because the paragraphs are too long and
contain multiple different ideas
so it works better to split them up
anyway this might look like a lot of
different things to learn but it has
approximately three different things to
learn so
grammar trees are one thing and they're
pretty focused on grammar and then when
you do paragraph trees they're pretty
different you're not worrying about
grammar anymore and instead you're going
to focus a lot more on the relationships
between the nodes which we didn't do
very much with sentence trees
and then when you do the next size up a
section tree or an essay tree or
something
then you're going to be taking kind of
big summary ideas and making a tree out
of those whereas with the paragraph tree
each node is a fairly small idea
so the sentence trees are the most
different and then all the rest are just
combining
different size groupings of ideas into a
tree
so they're all kind of the same concept
so if you've done the first three
then basically you understand it and
you're done learning it
it shouldn't be difficult when you've
done paragraph trees and section trees
to expand it and do a book tree or
whatever else
so here's a forum post by justin
and we're going to discuss his paragraph
sends is an anti-aging organization
they're trying to
do medical research to increase
longevity
i think this is a reasonably typical
paragraph it's not especially good or
bad
so our main goals with paragraph tree
when we won we need to make a tree
it's going to show parent and child
relationships between the nodes and two
we're going to explain those
relationships you'll see what that means
soon
so first i broke up the paragraph into
nodes
each of the nodes on screen
ranges from a sentence to a clause some
of them are less than a sentence some of
them are a whole sentence
we've got
eight different nodes
i tried to break them up
roughly where there were separate ideas
that seemed like they deserved their own
separate attention
so the next thing i did is sort them for
important ideas versus unimportant ideas
the unimportant ones are
details or modifiers or things that you
could leave out
the important ideas are things that
might be the main idea of the paragraph
i was trying to think which ones could
be the main idea and which ones are
definitely not the main idea
and i organized it that way so it's kind
of like the maybe pile and the no pile
for what the main idea is we want to
find the main idea so we can have the
root of our tree
and it might be hard to immediately
figure out what that is so you can start
by sorting it into this one's definitely
noted this one might be it
the next thing i did was look at the
more important ideas and simplify them
to try to see what i was dealing with
so the first one
says basically you might have x
next one is x might be a better focus
and finally
therefore focusing on y would be an
error
i used variables here because it makes
the sentences extra short
so the basic structure here is we have
0.1.2 and not a conclusion
this helps us see what we're looking at
we've
taken the whole paragraph and focused on
just a couple parts
variables are good for simplifying but
you don't always need them in my case
the variables represent short phrases of
one or two words so they weren't really
necessary i'm using them anyways so i
can show you guys how to use them
variables are also good for grouping if
you say x equals and then you put
several words and then you keep calling
that x
it's going to be really clear that that
is one unit one thing
because you refer to it as x which is a
single thing
okay so how do we figure out the root of
the tree
basically the root is the conclusion
relationships can also be thought of as
whole slash-part relationships
the parent is being made up of the
children so it is the whole and the
children are the parts so you're
integrating the parts to get the whole
the bigger thing
so the conclusion is integrated from the
parts that are arguments
claims evidence premises facts stuff
like that
reasons
you can also see parent-child
relationship as main versus details
when you go lower down in the tree to
stuff that is more nested it is less
important it's more
fitting into little details instead of
main points
so the arguments are the extra details
that help the conclusion
so they're its children
another way to see it is there's usually
one conclusion based on multiple reasons
so the thing you have one of should be
the root not the thing you have multiple
of
it is possible to have one argument and
then reach five conclusions based on it
but that is atypical
so here is a partial tree of the
paragraph puts the conclusion on top and
then it puts the two reasons underneath
it
so next we need to think about the
relationships
these are a really important part of
paragraph trees that we didn't see
in sentence trees
so a very common basic relationship is
because
we have this conclusion because of this
child node
i did the tree four different ways to
show you different ways you could
organize something
one of them is just a style difference
so
you can label the connection lines with
the relationships or
you can give the relationships their own
nodes
i generally prefer giving them their own
nodes
it's easier to see and treats them as
something important instead of a minor
side note but it's not that big a deal
either way
so to a loose approximation you will
frequently have a tree that alternates
you'll have a node that is words from
the sun the paragraph and then you'll
have a relationship a connection an
explanation of how it connects to the
next thing and then you'll have
more words from the paragraph and then
another relationship and then more words
from the paragraph it goes back and
forth it doesn't have to
over here we have two relationship nodes
in a row because i used an and to group
things together
but over on the far right
we've got an alternating pattern which
is common
i recommend using two colors for this
type of tree so you can quickly see
which ones are the relationship nodes
and which ones are the regular nodes
if you write the
relationships
as side notes on the lines instead of
their own nodes then two colors would be
less needed
but still nice to have
so it's also showing here different
potential ways to look at
the tree so
do we have a conclusion that is because
the first thing and also because the
second thing
or
do you have a conclusion that is because
the group
of two things
or
is it because one of the things
and then there's actually a sub
relationship
so you can think about it there are
different possible ways to organize it
and you have to consider what makes
sense for your paragraph
so
if you're not sure you can try doing it
multiple ways and then look them over
and see what worked out well
in this case my favorite
was the the right one
i think focusing on
y would be an error because x might be
better
which is important because
you might have x meaning x might be the
situation might be the case
so i thought the sub reason made sense
there
now that we have the
tree started we can add in the other
details from the paragraph
so these are the nodes that i haven't
included yet
first i simplified them
so it's they're easier to work with
i brought back the whole paragraph
because i needed to refer to it to
figure out how to simplify them
to figure out what words like that
referred to
and look at the context a bit to figure
out what to do with each of the notes
so now i want to start adding
relationships between things
so we've got some different types of
relationships we have a restatement
x is the case and then it should be
stated there are x
so we can find that in the paragraph i
would guess that that is the case
and then it is a dash which is a common
punctuation used for restatements and
then we have that there are
such more actionable problems
so he's trying to restate the same idea
again in different words
basically he used two that's and it's
confusing so he restated it with the
actual thing um more actionable problems
but when you use the variables x
the restatement is unnecessary it
doesn't really add anything useful
this ending part just some thoughts
i figured was a disclaimer the point of
it is to say i might be wrong don't take
this too seriously this isn't
really thought through advice that's a
little bit half baked i don't want to be
pushy i don't want to tell you what to
do
you know i'm just giving you a little
bit of advice i didn't put a ton of work
into it
take it with a grain of salt
if it's helpful great if it's not
helpful that is okay it sort of gives
the person permission
to not listen if they don't want to
then we have this other grouping this
was the hardest one
so he said x doesn't contradict spending
time on y so he's sort of arguing
against his own conclusion that focusing
on y would be an error but then he's
like well maybe he could spend time on y
so i decided he was trying to express a
logical caveat because he said um
necessarily
so he's like it's not a logical
necessity
but
but like maybe you should do it this way
the connection here was the most
confusing i came up with suggestion to
ignore caveat because he's kind of
saying is like here's this you know
logical possibility that goes against
what i'm saying
and then he's just sort of like but
maybe do what i'm saying anyways
it doesn't really give a great reason i
think the basic reason is that it was
just a logical caveat it wasn't actually
a substantive point he's just like it's
not a hundred percent logically required
which who cares we're trying to figure
out what's reasonable or practical
not just
what the very boundaries of logic are
so he brought up this logic thing for
some reason
but then went against that
so i started putting the tree together
the caveat
is for the main idea and the disclaimer
is also for the main idea
and then the restatement thing
and to figure out where that goes
because i don't yet have a connection
node for it i don't have any teal node
so next i got a teal node attached to it
sometimes you can find the relationship
explained in the sentence like this one
that said suggestion to ignore caveat
the sentence had the word but so you
could have used but as the relationship
it somewhat explains it it's not as
clear but but was in the sentence and is
telling you something about the
relationship
this other one
he says it is a guess so i used guess as
the relationship
so he says he's guessing that that being
the thing in the previous sentence so we
can connect it to the thing in the
previous sentence
draw on the line and now we have a tree
so that was a simplified tree where i
had very shortened
approximate versions of what the nodes
were
i did lose some information it was very
abbreviated
so there are upsides and downsides to
that
it's usually easier to work with really
simple sentences and clauses
you've got less stuff to deal with and
you're focusing more on the main points
however you don't have to simplify
if you know what you're doing if you've
done it a lot of times before you might
just skip the simplifying
it might be easy enough without
simplifying
alternatively you can unsimplify at the
end so you can simplify make the tree
then once you have the tree
you can undo that and look at the full
version
so to unsimplify you can replace the
variables
with words phrases
you can also replace nodes with original
text
and it can be useful to have multiple
versions of the final tree
and compare them so we'll do that
first we're going to try removing
variables
so
we're going to take the y and change it
into sends
then the x becomes urgent problems
we can keep going through
and we just do basic variable
substitution that is confusing to you
then you might want to study some
algebra
so now we have a tree with no variables
in it
so it's a little bit longer but it is
also
a little bit easier to read in some ways
because you don't have to remember what
the variables mean
then we can go even further
and
put the original text back into the tree
so now each node
is
actual quotes of the forum post instead
of my own wordings
i did add a couple things in square
brackets to clarify
because
when you break the paragraph up into
parts some of the references become
problematic you can't understand what
it's referring to when you're only
looking at that part
like if you had the word he in a node
but there was nowhere in that note
saying who he is
then you would have a problem the note
doesn't stand on its own
so
i added a few notes in square brackets
so we can compare
the original text
with the simplified version
you can see in the simplified one there
are significantly fewer words it's
faster to read through it you can look
at the structure of the tree and get the
big picture more quickly and easily
on the other hand the original text has
more details and you can connect it back
to the paragraph it's easier to connect
the nodes
in the tree to the actual writing and
the paragraph and relate them together
and understand how the tree corresponds
to the paragraph
you can also
correspond between the two different
trees
you can read the short version of
something
and then if you're not sure about a
detail you can look at the
longer tree and find the same node
so now that we have our trees we can go
back to the paragraph
and try to understand what it's about
so here's the conclusion which is in the
middle
i looked for that first i think it's a
good place to start
the main point
is that focusing on sends might be an
error
the reason is
that a person might have more
immediately actionable problems
so it could be better to focus on the
more immediate problems instead of the
long-term problem that
without advancements in medical
technology will die of old age
and so justin guesses
that that is the case that
the person does have more immediate
problems in their life
and then we get this
caveat
and then we sort of take it back
and then we have the disclaimer the
permission
to not be bossed around by this
paragraph
i try not to get very hung up on details
there are problems like this comma might
be wrong i think the first sentence
might have a grammar error it's hard to
tell exactly what the intention is
and then i think there are
reference or pronoun errors because we
have the
you might have more and then there's the
i would guess that that is the case so
what this should mean
is
you're guessing that the thing you said
earlier is the case and the thing you
said earlier is you might have more
immediate actionable problems so there's
the um the might have
is included in the original thing so
when you refer to it it should be
included still but then this restatement
here says that there are such more
actionable problems so restatement drops
the might it doesn't restate it as that
there might be more actionable problems
it restates it that there are more
actionable problems so the might turn
into or are
so analyzing text is also useful for
writers they can try to understand what
they're trying to say
you can construct it as a tree
potentially first and then write your
paragraph like if you make an organized
tree and then you try to write a
paragraph to go with it you'll probably
get a paragraph that actually makes
sense
and it's organized and flows well
anyway the main points here were
how do you make a paragraph tree
and in particular you add nodes for the
relationships between the sentences
you try to understand how the different
parts fit together and actually put that
into words
why are these sentences in the same
paragraph what is the connection between
them
making a paragraph tree should get you
thinking about that
it should also get you thinking about
what is the main point
and what are lesser points details
optional bits stuff like that so what is
the focus and what is not the focus
methods like these let you work through
understanding a paragraph
they give you a way to not be stuck and
not be confused and not be unsure what
to do and so on there are steps you can
go through step by step
and if you practice them then even when
you run into a hard case
you're used to going through the steps
you can still go through them if you
wait until a paragraph seems really hard
and then you try to do the steps and
it's the first time or the second time
you're doing the steps you're probably
going to struggle because then you're
learning two things at once you're
trying to deal with a hard paragraph and
you're trying to use unfamiliar steps so
you want to take the steps in this video
and practice them
until you're comfortable with them
and then after that you can start using
them on just the paragraphs you find
difficult
but at first you want to practice them
on some paragraphs that aren't really
very difficult for you so you can focus
on learning the steps on how to do a
paragraph tree
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