Gori the Grey
The Poster
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2009
- Messages
- 13,354
My professor in "Textual Production in English" calls your approach the 'deductive approach', versus the opposite 'inductive approach'. He said it is the most effective way of the two to transmit knowledge.
For what it's worth, the two approaches are not incompatible. You can state your generalization as the topic sentence of your paragraph, or thesis of your essay, then go into the details that support it, and then end your paragraph or essay reiterating the general principle that those specifics support in a rephrased version of the topic sentence or thesis.
Writing almost always involves just such a movement between general statements and specifics.