This is there so that the reader knows who is speaking and what they are doing. In dialogue, or when you start dialogue, you start a new paragraph when someone new is talking or doing an action. You can also use a paragraph break to split up a sizeable chunk of dialogue. While you might want to put other characters doing an action to break up a monologue, if you have a situation where one person is delivering a very large speech, you can use paragraphs to make it easier on the reader.
Your paragraphs should contain only one overarching point or topic; one focus. This rule does, largely, comes down to experience to get it right. You can very legitimately have a single paragraph that looks like it has multiple topics woven together. Ultimately, however, it will have one overall point that it is trying to make. When you jump to a new time or place you need to start a new paragraph.
If your criminal who wants to be a vet is preparing for a burglary, at their house, in the first paragraph, you will need to start a new one if they go to their local bank to complete a robbery. This also encompasses if your point of view changes time or place.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. The purpose of this handout is to give some basic instruction and advice regarding the creation of understandable and coherent paragraphs. 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. Sentences for completing a paragraph — While the trope of the man-eating piranhas lends excitement to the adventure stories, it bears little resemblance to the real-life piranha. By paying more attention to fact than fiction, humans may finally be able to let go of this inaccurate belief.
Despite the fact that piranhas are relatively harmless, many people continue to believe the pervasive myth that piranhas are dangerous to humans. This impression of piranhas is exacerbated by their mischaracterization in popular media. For example, the promotional poster for the horror film Piranha features an oversized piranha poised to bite the leg of an unsuspecting woman. Such a terrifying representation easily captures the imagination and promotes unnecessary fear.
While the trope of the man-eating piranhas lends excitement to the adventure stories, it bears little resemblance to the real-life piranha. Imagine each paragraph as a sandwich. The real content of the sandwich—the meat or other filling—is in the middle. It includes all the evidence you need to make the point. But it gets kind of messy to eat a sandwich without any bread. So, the top slice of bread the first sentence of the paragraph explains the topic or controlling idea of the paragraph.
And, the bottom slice the last sentence of the paragraph tells the reader how the paragraph relates to the broader argument. In the original and revised paragraphs below, notice how a topic sentence expressing the controlling idea tells the reader the point of all the evidence.
Piranhas rarely feed on large animals; they eat smaller fish and aquatic plants. Their fear of humans makes sense. Far more piranhas are eaten by people than people are eaten by piranhas. Although most people consider piranhas to be quite dangerous, they are, for the most part, entirely harmless. Suppose that we wanted to start the piranha paragraph with a transition sentence—something that reminds the reader of what happened in the previous paragraph—rather than with the topic sentence.
Our paragraph might look like this the topic sentence is bold :. Like sharks, snakes, and spiders, piranhas are widely feared.
If a paragraph has more than one main idea, consider eliminating sentences that relate to the second idea, or split the paragraph into two or more paragraphs, each with only one main idea. Body : follows the introduction; discusses the controlling idea, using facts, arguments, analysis, examples, and other information. The following paragraph illustrates this pattern of organization.
In front of the tiny pupil of the eye they put , on Mount Palomar, a great monocle inches in diameter, and with it see times farther into the depths of space. Or , if we want to see distant happenings on earth, they use some of the previously wasted electromagnetic waves to carry television images which they re-create as light by whipping tiny crystals on a screen with electrons in a vacuum.
Or they can bring happenings of long ago and far away as colored motion pictures, by arranging silver atoms and color-absorbing molecules to force light waves into the patterns of original reality. Or if we want to see into the center of a steel casting or the chest of an injured child, they send the information on a beam of penetrating short-wave X rays, and then convert it back into images we can see on a screen or photograph.
In a coherent paragraph, each sentence relates clearly to the topic sentence or controlling idea, but there is more to coherence than this. If a paragraph is coherent, each sentence flows smoothly into the next without obvious shifts or jumps. A coherent paragraph also highlights the ties between old information and new information to make the structure of ideas or arguments clear to the reader. If you have written a very long paragraph, one that fills a double-spaced typed page, for example, you should check it carefully to see if it should start a new paragraph where the original paragraph wanders from its controlling idea.
On the other hand, if a paragraph is very short only one or two sentences, perhaps , you may need to develop its controlling idea more thoroughly, or combine it with another paragraph. A number of other techniques that you can use to establish coherence in paragraphs are described below.
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