Chapter 4 Summary

In this chapter you will learn how to build effective paragraphs and when creating them you want to make sure they are clearly focused, well developed, organized, coherent, and neither too long or too short. The first part of the paragraph is to focus on the main point in a topic sentence and what the reader will look forward to in the following sentences. Usually in a paragraph the topic sentence which is like a thesis will be the first sentence but can be with held to the end of the paragraph. You want to stick to the main point and if you have sentences that don’t support the topic sentence it will destroy the paragraph. If your paragraph doesn’t work it won’t be as simple as deleting or moving material. The writer will be faced with a choice of finding more evidence or adjust the sentence to mesh with the evidence that is available.
When developing your main point you don’t want it to be too short to where the writer or audience loses the evidence or purpose. Organizing your writing can be done in many ways and are done by the way we think. Some for example are, illustrations, narration, cause and effect, description and analogy. With the illustration part it is an extended version of an example in story form. When used correctly they can be vivid and effective way to developing a point. On the other hand narrations tell a story or a part of a story and are arranged in chronological order. They can have flashbacks and interruptions that take you back in time. Cause and effect are a matter of argument they are too complex to be reduced to a simple pattern. A descriptive paragraph sketches a portrait of a person, place or thing by using concrete and specific details that appeal to one or more of our senses. Analogies draw comparisons between items that appear to have little in common. Some examples of how the writer uses them are: make the unfamiliar seen familiar, argue a point, or to provoke fresh thoughts or changed feelings about a subject.
A coherent paragraph is when it flows from one to another without bumps or gaps. One way to help is by linking ideas clearly through your writing. This means you have your main point in the topic sentence early in the paragraph and than your paragraphs have specific details to support topic. Another way is to use parallel structures which are used within sentences to underscore the similarity of ideas. They can also be used to bind together a series of sentences. One last step that can help would be to have consistency throughout your writings. A rule mentioned under consistency said that a sentence’s subject should echo a subject or object in the previous sentence. You want to avoid excessive repetitions of key words, which is also called trapping. Providing transition helps the reader move from sentence to sentence. One way is called sentence-level transitions which are certain words and phrases that signal connections between sentences. You want to be careful to select transitions with appropriate tone. There is also paragraph level transitions which usually link the first sentence of the previous paragraph. The last transition is between blocks of text which talks about letting the reader know the connections between the text and you do this by inserting transitional sentences or short paragraph at key points.
Readers feel comfortable sticking to about one hundred to two hundred words for the paragraphs but if needed you can adjust them. Longer paragraphs strain the reader’s attention span but they can also show scholarly work if they are longer than one to two hundred words. Anything shorter would appear in newspapers, websites or business writing. Everything in the above paragraphs will help you build effective paragraphs the right way and help you achieve the scholarly level work.