My OperaHow to write good paragraphs
Thursday, May 31, 2007 3:22:31 PM
Learning to write good paragraphs requires students to master four following steps. The first step is that the students should learn how to write a topic sentence. In a paragraph, the topic sentence often comes at the first sentence. It states the main ideas of the paragraph. The topic sentence consists of a topic and controlling ideas. Next, students should learn how to write supportive sentences. These sentences come from the controlling ideas of the topic sentence. Students should give examples, statistics, facts, or quotations to explain or to modify the topic sentence. After that, they learn how to make their paragraphs united and coherent. In this step, keep in mind that all the ideas in the paragraph just support one main idea, the topic of the paragraph. In addition, the students should use some transitional signals to construct their writings smoothly. Finally, they should learn how to write a concluding sentence which often comes last in the paragraph. They can summarize all what they have discussed in the paragraph or restate the topic sentence in different ways. In short, when students follow these steps, they can produce good academic paragraphs.
