#5 Paragraph Organization

junio 16, 2020

Academic writing is a very broad term that can include a great number of different genres, such as research articles, essays, abstracts, papers, among many others. Academic genres imply the use of formal English: words of Latin or French origin, no contractions, compound or complex sentences and well-organized paragraphs. A paragraph is a set of sentences that begins with a TOPIC SENTENCE that is enlarged with examples, explanations, quotes, paraphrasing, statistics, and other instances of SUPPORTING MATERIAL. These sentences are placed IN GENERAL at the beginning of the paragraph, although INTRODUCTION and CONCLUSION pargraphs are exceptions to this rule.

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Start off with a topic sentence: what are you writing about, what is your subject. A good formula for following writing an effective topic sentence would be to come up with an interesting topic and give your opinion on it, say something interesting.
The body is the heart of your paragraph, so this is where you get all of the supporting details and arguments for your topic sentence.
There are two ways that you can order the details: the first way is by order of importance. If you are writing an argumentative essay, what is going to make your arguments really stand out, is what is the one part of your argument is strongest.
Secondly chronology, it refers to the ordering of events.
Finally, the closing sentence has two functions: first of all, you are reminding the audience what you are writing about so, you are restating your topic sentence and you are also keeping them thinking once they finish reading, about the important details you have mentioned before.

Topic sentences examples:

Many politicians deplore the passing of the old family-sized farm, but I'm not so sure.

1. I saw around Velva a release from what was like slavery to the tyrannical soil, release from the ignorance that darkens the soul and from the loneliness that corrodes it. In this generation my Velva friends have rejoined the general American society that their pioneering fathers left behind when they first made the barren trek in the days of the wheat rush. As I sit here in Washington writing this, I can feel their nearness. (from Eric Sevareid, "Velva, North Dakota")

Explanation:

Sevareid argues that farming is destructive as a way of life, no matter what romantic notions are attached to it. He is not writing about the productivity of farms, about his own life story ("I grew up on a family-sized farm..."), and his main point is not that people moved away from the cities in the late the nineteenth century.

There are two broad theories concerning what triggers a human's inevitable decline to death.

2. The first is the wear-and-tear hypothesis that suggests the body eventually succumbs to the environmental insults of life. The second is the notion that we have an internal clock which is genetically programmed to run down. Supporters of the wear-and-tear theory maintain that the very practice of breathing causes us to age because inhaled oxygen produces toxic by-products. Advocates of the internal clock theory believe that individual cells are told to stop dividing and thus eventually to die by, for example, hormones produced by the brain or by their own genes. (from Debra Blank, "The Eternal Quest" [edited]).

Explanation:
This paragraph is a straightforward description of two possibilities, neither of which is preferred over the other. In this case, it would be wrong to mention only one of the possibilities (the "internal time clock") in the topic sentence, or to treat it as a philosophical discussion of death itself ("we all must die..."). As for the biology professor, He or she might very well have given an interesting lecture, but that has nothing to do with the content of the paragraph.

We commonly look on the discipline of war as vastly more rigid than any discipline necessary in time of peace, but this is an error.

3. The strictest military discipline imaginable is still looser than that prevailing in the average assembly-line. The soldier, at worst, is still able to exercise the highest conceivable functions of freedom -- that is, he or she is permitted to steal and to kill. No discipline prevailing in peace gives him or her anything remotely resembling this. The soldier is, in war, in the position of a free adult; in peace he or she is almost always in the position of a child. In war all things are excused by success, even violations of discipline. In peace, speaking generally, success is inconceivable except as a function of discipline. (from H.L. Mencken, "Reflections on War" [edited]).

Explanation:
The topic sentence must emphasise the comparative nature of the paragraph. Mencken does argue that soldiers need discipline, but this is not all he argues in this paragraph. Likewise, while soldiers may well serve an important function in wartime, and while they may well be able to compete well in peacetime, neither of these points is discussed in the paragraph.

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