What Is a Paragraph
• What is a paragraph?
• A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic.
• Learning to write good paragraphs will help you as a writer stay on track during your drafting and revision stages.
• Good paragraphing also greatly assists your readers in following a piece of writing. You can have fantastic ideas, but if those ideas aren't presented in an organized fashion, you will lose your readers (and fail to achieve your goals in writing).
Qualities of a Good Paragraph:
• Unity
• Coherence
• Emphasis
Unity
• Unity is the quality of sticking to one idea from start to finish, with every sentence contributing to the central purpose and main idea of that paragraph.
• In a unified paragraph, all of the supporting sentences serve to illustrate, clarify, and/or explain the main idea set forth in the topic sentence. • Cora is very discriminating. She sees no reason to settle for second best, and she hardly ever does. “Why spend an evening with boring people just to be with people? Why not spend an interesting evening at home alone?” She’d often say. She prefers old friends to strangers or mere acquaintances, and she will do just about anything for her friends – short of making dinner for them, which she does rarely because she wants to do it well or not at all. As infrequent as her invitations are, they are highly prized because she is a gourmet cook. Few people I know are as discriminating as Cora is, and I admire her for her insight and her taste.
• Later in the dusky streets I walked among the Navajo camps, past the doorways of the town, from which came the good smells of cooking, the festive sounds of music, laughter, and talk. The campfires rippled in the crisp wind that arose with evening and set a soft yellow glow on the ground, low on the adobe walls. A natural building material used for several thousand years, adobe is composed of sand and straw, which is shaped into bricks on wooden frames and dried
• A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic.
• Learning to write good paragraphs will help you as a writer stay on track during your drafting and revision stages.
• Good paragraphing also greatly assists your readers in following a piece of writing. You can have fantastic ideas, but if those ideas aren't presented in an organized fashion, you will lose your readers (and fail to achieve your goals in writing).
Qualities of a Good Paragraph:
• Unity
• Coherence
• Emphasis
Unity
• Unity is the quality of sticking to one idea from start to finish, with every sentence contributing to the central purpose and main idea of that paragraph.
• In a unified paragraph, all of the supporting sentences serve to illustrate, clarify, and/or explain the main idea set forth in the topic sentence. • Cora is very discriminating. She sees no reason to settle for second best, and she hardly ever does. “Why spend an evening with boring people just to be with people? Why not spend an interesting evening at home alone?” She’d often say. She prefers old friends to strangers or mere acquaintances, and she will do just about anything for her friends – short of making dinner for them, which she does rarely because she wants to do it well or not at all. As infrequent as her invitations are, they are highly prized because she is a gourmet cook. Few people I know are as discriminating as Cora is, and I admire her for her insight and her taste.
• Later in the dusky streets I walked among the Navajo camps, past the doorways of the town, from which came the good smells of cooking, the festive sounds of music, laughter, and talk. The campfires rippled in the crisp wind that arose with evening and set a soft yellow glow on the ground, low on the adobe walls. A natural building material used for several thousand years, adobe is composed of sand and straw, which is shaped into bricks on wooden frames and dried