Rearranging the Sentences in a Paragraph for Logic (ORG 405, 503)

A paragraph isn't just a bag of true sentences. Each sentence leans on the one before it with a pronoun, a repeated noun, a transition word, or a cause-and-effect link. Shuffle the sentences and the facts survive but the leaning breaks: 'it' no longer has anything to point to, 'because of that' no longer follows a cause. The fix works the same way every time. Scan for the one sentence that refers back to nothing already mentioned, no pronoun hunting for an antecedent, no 'that' hunting for a noun. That sentence has to come first, because every other sentence is waiting for something to attach to.

From there, follow the chain forward. A word like 'it' or 'that shortage' or 'because of that' is a hook; find the sentence holding the matching fact, and snap them together one link at a time. Cause-and-effect paragraphs often look chronological, and sometimes the time order and the logic order match. But plenty of paragraphs describe something out of time order on purpose, naming a category first and its three examples after, or stating a result before unpacking its causes. Chronology is a clue, not a rule.

The hardest version gives you two orders that each read smoothly on their own. When that happens, look outside the paragraph. If the next paragraph opens by discussing training, your paragraph should end on the detail that leads into training, not just the detail that sounds like a tidy ending. Placement questions elsewhere on the test ask you to slot one sentence into a fixed paragraph; this skill asks you to build the whole order yourself, using the identical reference-chain habit.