Chapter 7: Writing Great Paragraphs
Chapter Summary
Key Takeaways
- A clear paragraph provides your audience with an appropriate amount of information and is structured so that the reader can see the connection between ideas.
- The topic sentence expresses the main idea of the paragraph combined with the writer’s attitude or opinion about the topic.
- Supporting sentences help explain, prove, or enhance the topic sentence by offering facts, reasons, statistics, quotations, or examples.
- Concluding sentences summarize the key points in a paragraph and reiterate the main idea without repeating it word for word.
- You can use transitional words to help the reader see the connection between ideas and between paragraphs
- A summary concisely restates the main ideas of a source in the writer’s own words.
Activities for Further Learning
- Group activity: Working in a group of four or five, assign each group member the task of collecting one document each. These documents might include magazine or newspaper articles, workplace documents, academic essays, chapters from a reference book, film or book reviews, or any other type of writing. As a group, read through each document and discuss the author’s purpose for writing. Use the information you have learned in this chapter to decide whether the main purpose is to summarize, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate. Write a brief report on the purpose of each document, using supporting evidence from the text.
- Pick an assignment you’ve recently completed. Underline the topic sentence of each paragraph. If you don’t have a topic sentence, write one in the margins. Next, number the rest of the sentences within your paragraph from most to least important. When you’re done, take a look at your paragraphs. Did you notice any trends? Are all of the paragraphs organized from most to least important, or did you use a different organizational pattern? Based on what you’ve learned, rewrite any paragraphs that could use stronger organization.
- Pick an assignment you’ve recently completed. In the margins, write the purpose of each paragraph (or why it exists in the document). Next, take out a highlighter and highlight any sentence that fulfills the purpose. Look at your document. Does everything in the paragraph meet the purpose? If not, edit your document to split paragraphs or create new paragraphs.
Attribution
This chapter contains material taken from Introduction to Professional Communications is (c) 2018 by Melissa Ashman and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
This chapter also contains material taken from Paragraph Structure on WritingCommons.org. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
