The **Uneven U** is a way of thinking about your [[paragraph]]'s organization or structure. It comes from Eric Hayot's [[The Elements of Academic Style (2014)]], but it's useful for many [[genre|genres]] outside academic writing. ### Explanation Imagine categorizing sentences of a paragraph or argument according to a kind of spectrum organized by how close each sentence is to empirical evidence. On one end of the spectrum would be abstract claims, or **level 5**. This would be an extremely abstract claim or conclusion. On the _other_ end of the spectrum would be something nitty gritty, like a direct quotation from a primary source, or a piece of data. Something concrete and specific. This is a **level 1**. It's as "close" as you can get to concrete evidence. The idea of the Uneven U is that you start a pargraph or section at level 4—not quite a level-5 conclusion, but perhaps a topic sentence that is _oriented towards_ or _hints at_ a conclusion—and from there you descend _down_ 3-2-1 towards the evidence, before working your way back up, 1-2-3-4... and this time going all the way up to a level 5, that is, the conclusion or more abstract claim that the opening of your paragraph only _hinted_ at. It looks like this: ![[uneven_u.png|300]] The _end_ of a paragraph returns to the idea you alluded to at the _opening_ of your paragraph (i.e., your "topic sentence"). However, at the end, you don't just repeat yourself: you push things further. Because you've gone through all that nitty gritty evidence in the middle of the paragraph, at the _end_ of the paragraph you can show how all this relates back to the bigger picture (i.e., how does this individual paragraph support your "main" claim or claims?). You can also apply this concept to the structure of your writing as a whole: [[the Uneven U is fractal]].