Paragraph Development

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Paragraph Development

• Milly Grillone
• FAO International Consultant

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PARAGRAPH DEVELOPMENT Plan before writing!
TOPIC SENTENCE
BODY
CONCLUDING SENTENCE
TRANSITIONAL EXPRESSIONS
SUPPORT MAIN IDEAS
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Developing a paragraph

• Unity The Topic Sentence
• A paragraph deals with one main idea (topic
  sentence). If you are moving away from that idea,
  conclude the paragraph and start a new one.
• The first thing you must determine about each
  paragraph is its focus. Once you have done so,
  you should never allow yourself to veer away from
  that governing idea.

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Developing a paragraph Unity The Topic Sentence

• Most often the topic sentence comes first, and
  the point made in the topic sentence is developed
  and supported by the rest of the paragraph.
  Without some kind of topic sentence, the
  paragraph is rudderless and the reader is lost
• Undeveloped essays may contain entire paragraphs
  of topic sentences, combining several expandable
  ideas into one block of unsupported assertions.
  If an idea is important enough to mention it is
  important enough to develop if a general
  statement is worth making, it is worth supporting
  in detail.

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Developing your Topic Sentence

• After the topic sentence, the rest of the
  paragraph supports the point you wish to make.
  Inexperienced writers often fail to construct
  effective paragraphs because they make an
  assertion without backing it up.
• If you are writing a paper about agricultural
  trade, you might find it useful to include
  statistical information to strengthen your
  argument. Never state without supporting evidence.

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The Functions of ParagraphsAnalyzing

• This paragraph subdivides the subject and
  analyzes each sub-topic.
• Every student who attends university needs three
  types of education general education, liberal
  education, and specialized education. By general
  education I mean that education which is required
  to become an effective member of the human race
  it provides us with the means of communication
  with one another, with an understanding of the
  relationships between human beings and the
  institutions which they establish, with an
  analytical approach toward the physical universe
  of which we are all a part, and with a concept of
  the position which we hold in the stream of time
  and history. By liberal education I mean the
  education that frees us from the confines of the
  group, the patterns, the conventions, and enables
  us to become truly an individual it is therefore
  the education which discovers our greatest
  abilities and interests and then develops them to
  the highest capacities which we can achieve. By
  specialized education I mean the education which
  will enable us to make a living in a competitive
  economic world especially in America there is
  very little leisure class, and every educated
  person is expected to have some place in which to
  render a valuable service .

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The Functions of Paragraphs Contrasting and
Comparing

• One of the masses is built of cut stone, the
  other of poured concrete. One took 50,000 men
  twenty years to build, the other will take 5,000
  men six years, in a task not only three times
  greater but vastly more complex and dangerous.
  Both structures relied on the labor of those who
  would otherwise have been unemployed. Egyptian
  peasants in the off season built Cheops American
  workingmen and engineers shelved by a great
  depression are building Grand Coulee. Pyramids
  were houses for the dead. Dams are centers of
  energy for the living. It is better, I think, to
  live in the age of the Great Dams than in the age
  of the Great Pyramids.

• The construction of the Cheops and the Grand
  Coulee dam is compared and contrasted, aspect by
  aspect.
• The use of a transitional device ("On the other
  hand") is very important to signal the shift in
  this pattern of comparison

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The Functions of Paragraphs Defining

• In most essays there are terms to be defined. An
  expository paragraph may be the beginning of a
  more complex argument, like this
• Sukiyaki (pronounced by the Japanese in three
  syllables with no accent--shee-yah-kee) is the
  dish that has proved most popular among American
  visitors to Japan. It is not, as it is sometimes
  described, a Japanese imitation of chop suey, but
  is a native concoction with a long and honorable
  history. Its ingredients may vary, but they
  consist usually of raw beef sliced paper-thin,
  onions, spinach, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, bean
  curd, and a kind of gelatinous noodle, with sugar
  and rice wine and soy sauce as seasonings. It is
  the cooking and eating of sukiyaki, however,
  rather than the food itself, that makes it an
  experience to remember. The guests gather round a
  thick skillet set on a charcoal burner, and the
  raw ingredients (brought in beautifully arranged
  on a huge plate, for the Japanese believe in
  eating first with their eyes) are cooked in their
  presence. After part of the food has been allowed
  to simmer with its seasonings for a tantalizing
  while, the guests reach into the common skillet
  with their chopsticks, taking out whatever pieces
  please them and dipping them into a beaten raw
  egg. Sukiyaki is not just a food, it is a social
  experience for all evening long the guests sit
  around the pan "cooking and eating," as the
  Japanese say, "and eating and cooking."

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The Functions of Paragraphs Showing Results

• The topic sentence of this paragraph will
  provide a starting point for a series of results
  which comprise the rest of the paragraph.
• The cold, the dark, and the intense
  radioactivity, together lasting for months,
  represent a severe assault on our civilization
  and our species. Civil and sanitary services
  would be wiped out. Medical facilities, drugs,
  the most rudimentary means for relieving the vast
  human suffering, would be unavailable. Any but
  the most elaborate shelters would be useless,
  quite apart from the question of what good it
  would be to emerge a few months later. Synthetics
  burned in the destruction of the cities would
  produce a wide variety of toxic gases, including
  carbon monoxide, cyanides, dioxins and furans.
  After the dust and soot settled out, the solar
  ultraviolet flux would be much larger than its
  present value. Immunity to disease would decline.
  Epidemics and pandemics would be rampant,
  especially after the billion or so unburied
  bodies began to thaw. Moreover, the combined
  influence of these severe and simultaneous
  stresses on life are likely to produce even more
  adverse consequences--biologists call them
  synergisms that we are not yet wise enough to
  foresee.

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The Functions of Paragraphs Describing Analogies

• This paragraph develops an idea by means of a
  comparison with a similar idea.
• Light and all other forms of radiation are
  analogous to water-ripples or waves, in that they
  distribute energy from a central source. The
  solar radiation distributes through space the
  vast amount of energy which is generated inside
  the sun. We hardly know whether there is any
  actual wave-motion in light or not, but we know
  that both light and all other types of radiation
  are propagated in such a form that they have some
  of the properties of a succession of waves.

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Paragraph Order

• As you develop paragraphs, you are collecting
  sentences that build upon your initial statement.
  The arrangement of these sentences is as
  important as the sentences themselves. A
  paragraph requires a certain level of drama. Use
  structure to your advantage a paragraph which
  moves in a specific direction is more powerful
  than one which wanders about aimlessly. Here are
  some examples of strategies that can give your
  paragraphs greater coherence and greater effect
• Climax
• Familiar-To-Unfamiliar
• General-To-Particular
• Particular-To-General
• Chronology

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1. Paragraphs That Build A Climax

• Build from matter-of-fact observation to a grand
  statement. The effect is a dramatic build toward
  a climactic moment.
• The cultural laggards are noisy but tangible
  events since the impasse was reached show net
  gains for dynamo behavior and losses for
  stagecoach behavior not only in the United
  States, but all over the world. Vendibility is
  definitely in retreat. Nation after nation has
  left the gold standard, to embark on managed
  currency policies in which the bankers correctly
  find no hope for maintaining a private monopoly
  of credit. The state has been forced to support
  millions of citizens without requiring the
  traditional quid pro quo of work, because there
  was no work for them to do. Autarchy has all but
  destroyed the world free market. Dictatorships,
  one after another, supersede voting, parliaments,
  checks, and balances. Centralization and
  government control of industry proceed at a
  violent pace. The end no man can foresee, but the
  general direction is clear enough. All industrial
  nations are in the turmoil of a transition
  period, seeking more or less blindly for
  stabilities which accord with technological
  imperatives. History is at one of its most
  momentous passages.

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2. Familiar To Unfamiliar

• Begin with an example of personal experience
  with which the reader can identify, and move from
  that example into a more technical discussion
• Certain moments of the mind have a special
  quality of well-being. A mathematician friend of
  mine remarked that his daughter, aged eight, had
  just stumbled without his teaching onto the fact
  that some numbers are prime numbers--those, like
  11 or 19 or 83 or 1,023, that cannot be divided
  by any other integer (except, trivially, by 1).
  "She called them 'unfair numbers'," he said. "And
  when I asked her why they were unfair, she told
  me, "Because there's no way to share them out
  evenly."" What delighted him most was not her
  charming turn of phrase nor her equitable turn of
  mind (17 peppermints to give to her friends?)
  but--as a mathematician--the knowledge that the
  child had experienced a moment of pure scientific
  perception. She had discovered for herself
  something of the way things are. The satisfaction
  of such a moment at its most intense--and this is
  what ought to be meant, after all, by the
  tarnished phrase "the moment of truth"--is not
  easy to describe. It partakes at once of
  exhilaration and tranquility. It is luminously
  clear. It is beautiful. The clarity of the moment
  of discovery, the beauty of what in that moment
  is seen to be true about the world, is the most
  fundamental attraction that draws scientists on.

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3. General To Particular

• This pattern is particularly effective in an
  introduction, but is applicable elsewhere.
• In Shakespeare's England a standing army was
  unknown. There was no general military
  organization. The military defence of the realm
  rested upon two Statues passed in 1557, the one
  for Arms and Armour, the other for Taking of
  Musters. The first required "every nobleman,
  gentleman, or other temporal person" to keep,
  according to his means, a fixed number of
  weapons, horses, and suits or articles of
  defensive armour. The most interesting point in
  this Act is the fact that. though the existence
  of fire-arms is recognized by the obligation of
  the wealthiest classes to furnish "haquebuts,"
  the longbow is none the less exalted as the first
  of missile weapons, and practice at the
  archery-butts is still strictly enjoined upon the
  people at large. This was an absurdity, for
  fire-arms in the hands of skillful Spaniards and
  Italians had already been brought to considerable
  perfection, and the famous longbow was
  practically obsolete.

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4. Particular To General

• Going from the particular to the general can be
  just as effective as its opposite it is often
  used in the conclusion to an essay.
• Nineteen forty-eight saw the beginning of the
  systematic suppression of the Greek guerillas--a
  rather baffling police operation executed by
  indigenous forces, with the United States
  supplying only material aid and technical advice.
  Nineteen forty-nine was the year that turned the
  tide in Berlin through a massive logistic effort
  carried out primarily by the Americans
  themselves. The current year has seen United
  Nations intervention in Korea, again an operation
  in which American forces have played the leading
  role. These examples suggest that the number of
  active danger spots at any one time is limited,
  and that it is possible to shift the emphasis and
  to divert resources from one place to another
  nearly as rapidly as the Soviet Union can itself
  shift its point of attack. The resources, the
  technique, perhaps some of the same planes that
  won the struggle from Berlin went into the air
  movements of troops and supplies that contributed
  so decisively to the American advance in Korea.
  In sum, the containment policy rests on the idea
  of a strategic reserve--a flexible concept as
  opposed to the static and impossible notion of
  simply manning a wall.

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5. Chronology

• A a chronology explains by listing events in
  order it is a particular kind of narrative,
  where the sequence of events is important, and is
  carefully signaled.
• The new earth, freshly torn from its parent sun,
  was a ball of whirling gases, intensely hot,
  rushing through the black spaces of the universe
  on a path at a speed controlled by immense
  forces. Gradually the ball of flaming gases
  cooled. The gases began to liquefy, and Earth
  became a molten mass. The materials of this mass
  eventually became sorted out in a definite
  pattern the heaviest in the center, the less
  heavy surrounding them, and the least heavy
  forming the outer rim. This is the pattern which
  persists today a central sphere of molten iron,
  very nearly as hot as it was 2 billion years ago,
  an intermediate sphere of semi-plastic basalt,
  and a hard outer shell, relatively quite thin and
  composed of solid basalt and granite.

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Paragraph Transitions

• Although your paragraphs will be self-contained,
  they must interlock effectively to produce a
  strong overall argument. Transitions both between
  and within paragraphs are essential because they
  signal changes in direction and help the reader
  follow those changes. Simple words like however,
  in addition, for example, although, whereas and
  finally tie sentences together effectively.
• The most important transitions come between
  paragraphs. Try to establish a connection between
  the first sentence of a new paragraph and the
  last sentence of the preceding one. Again a
  linking word may be the easiest way
• . . . Thus the pattern established by Dickens in
  the first chapter is consistent throughout the
  rest of the first volume.
• However, Volume Two offers a new approach to the
  narrative. . .
• The echo of a key phrase or word can also be
  effective
• . . . Whatever Lear's faults, it cannot be denied
  that he loves his daughters.
• Unfortunately, love counts for little in the
  realm of Regan and Goneril. . . .

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Paragraph Transitions

• However, echoing the preceding sentence too
  closely will result in repetition rather than
  transition. This example was an attempt to link
  the introduction to the body of the essay
• . . . The other important function Bottom has is
  his major contribution to the humorous aspect of
  the play.
• One of the major functions of Bottom is his
  contribution to the play's humor. . . .
• The transition may require more than just a word
  a transitional sentence may be called for
• The evidence thus suggests that there is no other
  option.
• And yet there may still be a solution. If you
  disregard . . .
• The transitional sentence does not indicate what
  will come next in the paragraph, but it
  establishes that this paragraph is a negation of
  the last. Note that this kind of sentence
  displaces the topic sentence you would expect to
  find at the beginning of the paragraph the topic
  sentence should follow it.
• Sentences must follow one another in a logical
  pattern. If thoughts follow one another without
  sufficient connection, the essay will make no
  sense. Within each paragraph you will be using
  transitions almost continuously.

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• TRANSITIONAL EXPRESSIONSTransitional words give
  unity and coherence to the paragraph by relating
  sentences to each other. Linking words and word
  groups are called transitional expressions.
• Addition....also, in addition, too moreover, and,
  besides, further, furthermore, equally important,
  next, then finally. Example.....for example, for
  instance, thus, as an illustration, namely,
  specifically. Contrast....but, yet however, on
  the other hand, nevertheless, nonetheless,
  conversely, in contrast, on the contrary, still,
  at the same time. Comparison....similarly,
  likewise, in like manner, in the same way, in
  comparison. Concession....of course, to be sure,
  certainly, naturally, granted. Result....
  .therefore, thus, consequently, so, accordingly,
  due to this. Summary......as a result, hence, in
  short, in brief, in summary, in conclusion,
  finally, on the whole. Time...... first, second,
  third, fourth, next, then, finally, afterwards,
  before, soon, later, during, meanwhile,
  subsequently, immediately, at length, eventually,
  in the future, currently. Place..... in front,
  in the foreground, in the back, in the
  background, at the side, adjacent, nearby, in the
  distance, here, there.