The paragraph
A central building block for creating a text is the paragraph. It is a collection of sentences that
are unified both by its content and language. You should not regard the paragraph as a mere
lay-out issue that exists simply to avoid presenting the reader with a single, continuous piece
of writing. Instead each paragraph should be regarded as a functional unit that must be well
structured internally, and have to function as a part in the development of the text. Some of
the key features of a paragraph are listed below.
Functional properties of the paragraph
Unity
The paragraph must be clearly focused on a particular idea or messages and the information in
the paragraph should be presented in a way that communicates this message as effectively as
possible. It is often a good idea to explicitly express the main idea or topic of the paragraph in
a topic sentence (see “Central parts of the paragraph”). This can be more clearly illustrated
with some examples.
Club Palm Resort's beaches are beautiful, and the surrounding countryside is quite scenic.
The quality of the food leaves a lot to be desired. Many vacationers enjoy the variety of
outdoor activities and the instruction available in such sports as sailing and scuba diving.
Unfortunately, security is poor; several vacationers' rooms have been broken into and their
valuables stolen. Christmas in the Bahamas can make the thought of New Year's in Chicago
bearable.
In this paragraph it is not obvious what the writer wants to communicate. Is the intention to
bring up the positive AND negative aspects of the resort or only to describe the resort as a
positive contrast to Chicago? The writer has to decide on what the main idea of the paragraph
should be and develop that idea consistently. Compare the first paragraph with the revised
paragraph that follows.
For vacationers sick and tired of the frozen north, a week at Club Palm Resort can provide
just the midwinter thaw they need. Club Palm Resort's beaches are beautiful, and the
surrounding countryside is quite scenic. Many vacationers also enjoy the variety of outdoor
activities and the instruction available in such sports as sailing and scuba diving. Christmas
in the Bahamas can make the thought of New Year's in Minneapolis bearable.
In this paragraph the writer has decided on a main topic which is expressed in the underlined
topic sentence. The rest of the paragraph supports and develops that main idea.
Coherence
The individual sentences that the paragraph consists of must be formulated so that there is a
natural progression from one to the other and that there is an obvious connection between
them. There are a number of different language strategies that can be used to create
coherence: the order of information, sentence structure, repetition and the use of linking
words.
In the paragraph below, the information is fairly unified on the topic of ‘housing shortage’ but
it makes a number of different points that are not clearly linked to each other.
Limited investment in the housing sector makes it practically impossible to allocate sufficient
resources for urban dwellers' housing needs. A high rate of urban population growth has
increased the country's needs for housing. A small group of city officials has laid out a new
plan to combat the crisis. A solution to the housing-shortage problem is a vital policy issue
here. The housing problem has grown in the last twenty years.
In the revised paragraph, the order of information has been changed to make the relation
between the sentences clearer, and the writer has also pointed out how the different pieces of
information are related by using linking words like because and in fact.
Limited investment in the housing sector makes it practically impossible to allocate sufficient
resources for urban dwellers' housing needs. In fact, the problem has grown in the last
twenty years. Because a high rate of urban population growth has increased the country's
needs for housing, a solution to the housing-shortage problem is a vital policy issue here. A
small group of city officials has laid out a new plan to combat the crisis.
Progression/development
A paragraph should have a natural forward movement in the sense that the reader should feel
that the text has a clear goal. The text should develop its topic matter in a clear and focused
manner. Both a lack of progression and progression without a clear goal will be confusing to
the reader.
A vacation at Club Palm Resort has its good points and bad points. The beaches are nice, but
they may not be enough for some vacationers.
In the paragraph above, the topic sentence indicates a comparison of the advantages and
drawbacks of the resort, but the rest of the paragraph does not fulfil that promise. The writer
should not only have a good idea of what the main topic of the paragraph should be, but also
what supporting points should be included, and where the paragraph should end up. The final
sentence should be a natural end point of the current paragraph, and also a link to the
following paragraph. In the revised version below these problems have been corrected.
A midwinter vacation at Club Palm Resort has its good points and bad points. The beaches
are clean and uncrowded. The surrounding countryside is lush and soothing to winter-weary
eyes. Furthermore, being able to take sailing and scuba diving lessons, while friends back
home shovel snow, makes the outdoor activities extra-enjoyable. On the other hand, several
features of Club Palm Resort are substandard. The food is poor, and, because the club is
isolated, eating elsewhere is impossible. Security could also be better, as thefts from several
guests' rooms indicated. So, for some vacationers, nice scenery and fun activities may not be
enough to offset the possibility of poor service and lax security.
Central parts of the paragraph
Topic
It should be clear what the main idea of a paragraph is. It is sometimes claimed that this idea
should be expressed clearly in a single sentence fairly early in the paragraph, often referred to
as the topic sentence. This is not always possible, but it is important to have a clear idea of
what you want to communicate in the paragraph and construct the paragraph so that this is
clear also to the reader. The concept of a topic sentence is therefore useful even if it is not
explicitly formulated as a single sentence in the paragraph.
Supporting points
In order to communicate the central message of the paragraph, you need to include the right
type of background and supporting information. Nothing should be included unless it has a
clear function in delivering the message of the paragraph.
Concluding sentence
As mentioned before, the paragraph has to be well structured both in itself and as a part of the
larger text. It is therefore important that there is a link and progression from one paragraph to
the next. The function of the concluding sentence is thus both to make a natural conclusion to
the current paragraph and a way to connect to the next one.
Dividing a passage into paragraphs - exercise
In the following extract from an article, the separate paragraphs have been combined into a
single block of text. Divide the text into paragraphs where you find there is a natural break in
the text flow. Try to explain why you want the paragraph break at that particular place in the
text.
During the next few weeks publishers will release a crush of books, pile them onto delivery
lorries and fight to get them on the display tables at the front of bookshops in the run-up to
Christmas. It is an impressive display of competitive commercial activity. It is also
increasingly pointless. More quickly than almost anyone predicted, e-books are emerging as a
serious alternative to the paper kind. Amazon, comfortably the biggest e-book retailer, has
lowered the price of its Kindle e-readers to the point where people do not fear to take them to
the beach. In America, the most advanced market, about one-fifth of the largest publishers’
sales are of e-books. Newly released blockbusters may sell as many digital copies as paper
ones. The proportion is growing quickly, not least because many bookshops are closing. For
readers, this is splendid. Just as Amazon collapsed distance by bringing a huge range of books
to out-of-the-way places, it is now collapsing time, by enabling readers to download books
instantly. Moreover, anybody can now publish a book, through Amazon and a number of
other services. Huge choice and low prices are helping books hold their own on digital
devices, even against “Angry Birds”. For publishers, though, it is a dangerous time. Book
publishing resembles the newspaper business in the late 1990s, or music in the early 2000s.
Although revenues are fairly stable, and the traditional route is still the only way to launch a
blockbuster, the climate is changing. Some of the publishers’ functions—packaging books
and promoting them to shops—are becoming obsolete. Algorithms and online
recommendations threaten to replace them as arbiters of quality. The tide of self-published
books threatens to swamp their products. As bookshops close, they lose a crucial showcase.
And they face, as the record companies did, a near-monopoly controlling digital distribution:
Amazon’s grip over the e-book market is much like Apple’s control of music downloads.
The initial paragraph - exercise
All text should have a clear structure where the different parts have their own functions and
combine to create a good text of a particular type. The initial paragraph(s) has an important
function to play in any text. Read the four paragraphs below, which are all the initial
paragraphs in four different texts. Try to state in a single sentence what the main idea of each
paragraph is. What do you consider to be the main function of the initial paragraph? What are
the similarities and differences among the different paragraphs? How has the writers
structured the paragraphs to make them effective both in terms of delivering the message and
functioning as the first paragraph of a text?
Example one
WITHOUT them, life as we know it could not exist, yet the exact definition of the hydrogen
bond - credited with keeping water liquid and giving DNA its signature helical shape - has
always been fuzzy. Now these fundamental linkages have a new official definition that
broadens the situations in which they can arise. It should allow various chemical reactions and
behaviours to be better modelled and understood.
Example two
IF YOU want to spot a liar, don't bother with a polygraph. They are notoriously unreliable. In
a competition to find the world's most inappropriately named technology, the lie detector
would be hard to beat.
Example three
FOR a man who claims to lack expertise in the field, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an academic
at New York University, has made some impressively accurate political forecasts. In May
2010 he predicted that Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, would fall from power within a
year. Nine months later Mr Mubarak fled Cairo amid massive street protests. In February
2008 Mr Bueno de Mesquita predicted that Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, would
leave office by the end of summer. He was gone before September. Five years before the
death of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, Mr Bueno de Mesquita correctly named his
successor, and, since then, has made hundreds of prescient forecasts as a consultant both to
foreign governments and to America’s State Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies.
What is the secret of his success? “I don’t have insights—the game does,” he says.
Example four
Threats to global biodiversity from climate change (1-8) make it important to identify the
rates at which species have already responded to recent warming. There is strong evidence
that species have changed the timing of their life cycles during the year and that this is linked
to annual and longer-term variations in temperature (9–12). Many species have also shifted
their geographic distributions toward higher latitudes and elevations (13–17), but this
evidence has previously fallen short of demonstrating a direct link between temperature
change and range shifts; that is, greater range shifts have not been demonstrated for regions
with the highest levels of warming.
Paragraph separation
When you write you should divide your text into paragraphs. There are two ways to indicate
that you start a new paragraph: blank line or indentation.
Blank line
You leave a blank line between two paragraphs:
At first, this intriguing book appears to be a wander through the night written by a poet and essayist. There is a
chapter on sunset, and then another for each subsequent hour of darkness. In the end, though, each chapter is
merely a point of departure for a much more wide-ranging journey, through subjects such as astronomy, history,
palaeontology, the arts, culture and mythology.
The book is a portrait of darkness in all its forms. When the sun goes down, nocturnal creatures come out,
children worry about monsters, and hormonal changes seep through our bodies. The night is the realm of ghosts,
witches, dreams, bats, fireworks, prostitutes, northern lights, romance and the moon. Above all, it is the time
when the imagination flows most freely and emotions seem more intense.
Indentation
You start a new line and indent the first line of the new paragraph:
At first, this intriguing book appears to be a wander through the night written by a poet and essayist. There is a
chapter on sunset, and then another for each subsequent hour of darkness. In the end, though, each chapter is
merely a point of departure for a much more wide-ranging journey, through subjects such as astronomy, history,
palaeontology, the arts, culture and mythology.
The book is a portrait of darkness in all its forms. When the sun goes down, nocturnal creatures come
out, children worry about monsters, and hormonal changes seep through our bodies. The night is the realm of
ghosts, witches, dreams, bats, fireworks, prostitutes, northern lights, romance and the moon. Above all, it is the
time when the imagination flows most freely and emotions seem more intense.
DO NOT!
You should NOT indicate your paragraph by simply starting on a new line without leaving a
blank line or indenting:
At first, this intriguing book appears to be a wander through the night written by a poet and essayist. There is a
chapter on sunset, and then another for each subsequent hour of darkness. In the end, though, each chapter is
merely a point of departure for a much more wide-ranging journey, through subjects such as astronomy, history,
palaeontology, the arts, culture and mythology.
The book is a portrait of darkness in all its forms. When the sun goes down, nocturnal creatures come out,
children worry about monsters, and hormonal changes seep through our bodies. The night is the realm of ghosts,
witches, dreams, bats, fireworks, prostitutes, northern lights, romance and the moon. Above all, it is the time
when the imagination flows most freely and emotions seem more intense.