WRITING STAGE ONE

THE PARAGRAPH
The paragraph is the most important unit of meaning
in an essay.

An essay is not just a sequence of ideas, but the

development of one central thesis through certain
stages which are the paragraphs.

Sentences within a paragraph support and extend each

other to present a single, usually complex idea.
Features of a good Paragraph
The beginning of a paragraph should serve as a signal to
the reader that a new idea or a new direction for an idea
follows.
This is primarily done by the topic sentence. Within a
paragraph, all sentences should relate to a single main
idea, and this (effectively) ensures paragraph unity.
These sentences should have progression and
coherence by showing the reader how ideas develop
from one sentence to the other, while at the same time
providing details that support the main idea.
 The novelist – it is his distinction and danger – is terribly
exposed to life. Other artists, partially at least, withdraw;
they shut themselves up for weeks alone with a dish of apples
and a paint-box, or a roll of music paper and a piano. When
they emerge it is to forget and distract themselves. But the
novelist never forgets and is seldom distracted. He fills his
glass and enjoys presumably all the pleasures of talk and
table, but always with a sense that he is being stimulated and
played upon by the subject matter of his art. Taste, sound,
movement, a few words here, a gesture there, a man coming
in, a woman going out, even the motor that passes in the
street or the beggar who shuffles along the pavement, and all
the reds and blues and lights and shades of the scene claim
his attention and rouse his curiosity. He can no more cease to
receive impressions than a fish in mid-ocean can cease to let
the water rush through his gills.
Paragraph unity
As mentioned above, the most common way to unify a
paragraph is to make each sentence support the main idea.
A good writer uses his/her topic sentence as the foundation
and arranges the consecutive sentences in such a way that
they help the writer to explain his/her thoughts.
A paragraph can be developed by expanding the topic
sentence by:
Giving descriptive details of the person, place or thing
mentioned in it.
Giving examples or illustrations that clarify its meaning.
Supplying reasons for the truth of the statement the topic
sentence makes.
Coherence and use of transitions
A paragraph is coherent when the progression from
one sentence to the next is easy to follow.
To achieve this, a writer must arrange his/her ideas in
clearly understandable order, using sentence
connectors.
Sentences may be connected by the use of pronouns,
repetition, coordinating conjunctions, subordinating
conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, parallel syntactical
structures, and transitional phrases.
 When in high school, we occupied cubicles that were
unfit for human habitation. First, there were hundreds
of rats that incessantly mutilated our clothes and
beddings. Then there were those huge cracks on the
walls and ceilings that always gave the impression that
the rooms were slowly being torn apart. In fact, one of
my roommates preferred spending the nights in the
dinning hall rather than risk having the ceiling cave in
on him. This experience just proves that the
department of school inspectorate rarely does its job.
Task:
Identify the topic sentence and any connectors used.
 History, like a daily newspaper report, emphasizes
more on misfortunes than on the fortunes of its
subjects. In addition, most people find upheavals and
disturbances more exciting and worthy their attention.
Besides, the good and the ordinary are too obvious to
warrant our time and energy. However, we should
always remain vigilant so that we do not feel that the
world around us is crumbling with every passing
minute, based on the reporting we get from history
and newspaper reporting.
 In that instant, in too short a time (one would have thought), even
for the bullet to get there, a mysterious terrible change had come
over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of line of his
body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old,
as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed him without
knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have
been five seconds – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered.
An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have
imagined him a thousand years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the
second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his
feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired
a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of
the shot jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from
his legs. But in falling he seemed to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed
beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his
trunk reaching skywards like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only
time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that
seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.