The class will begin with a discussion question. Think about three important features that should be present in a body paragraph and which one should come first. What are they?
We will discuss the first principle, Unity. Take a look at thePARAGRAPH STRUCTURE HANDOUT. Understand that unity refers to having all the sentences in a paragraph relate to the topic sentence of that paragraph. You will work on exercise 4-1 in your textbook on pages 42 and 43. After that, we will come up with some strategies you can use to make your paragraph unified if you find that it is not.
Next, we will discuss the second principle,coherence. Understand that coherence refers to having the ideas or arguments of your paragraph presented in a logical order. We will look at the second section of the PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE HANDOUT and then turn to pages 50-53 of the textbook to look at the three strategies to make paragraphs coherent.
We will then move on to discussing the third principle, clear topic sentences. Having a clear topic sentence is important because it tells the reader what your paragraph is about. This is explained in section 3 of the PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE HANDOUT. All the information in that paragraph revolves around the topic sentence. The effective use of topic sentences is very important in academic and business writing where a lot of information is presented in written form. Additional information can be found in your text book on pages 40 and 41. Get into small groups and talk about the discussion questions in this section. We will then discuss the questions as a class.
The fourth principle of paragraph structure deals with development of ideas. This principle is discussed in the fourth section of the PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE HANDOUT. Development of ideas requires that every idea that you bring up to support your topic sentence must be discussed and explained adequately as well as supported with evidence and examples. We will then go over the discussion questions 1 and 2 on development of ideas. Discussion question 3 will be assigned as homework.
