Chapter
As you expand your research material and outline notes into sentences, you will also begin to package those sentences into larger units—paragraphs—that follow a standard, familiar structure that enables readers to easily follow their content and locate key information at a glance. If a sentence communicates a complete thought, a paragraph communicates a topic comprised of a few thoughts coherently collected together in an organized sequence. (Paragraphs themselves assemble to form larger units of meaning, such as sections in a report or chapters in a book, as you can see in this one, so paragraphs represent an intermediate level of organization in larger documents.) Whether your message is a long one made of many paragraphs or just one paragraph fired off in an email, organizing paragraphs helps you clarify your thoughts to both yourself and your reader.
- Paragraph Size and Structure
- Paragraph Coherence
Paragraph Size and Structure
A well-organized paragraph follows the standard three-part message structure. In a paragraph, we call these three parts the:
- Topic sentence
- Body or development sentences
- Transitional or concluding sentence
At a minimum, then, a paragraph should have at least three sentences, but ideally, 4-5 to allow the development of sentences in the body to explore the topic in detail. If a rule of thumb on sentence length is that sentences should vary in size but average about 25 words long, then a normal paragraph should be about ten lines on the page when the font is 12pt. in a document with 1-inch margins. Like sentences, however, paragraphs should vary in length depending on audience needs and abilities, as well as the topics being covered. An audience with advanced literacy skills can handle longer paragraphs that would lose an audience reading at a more basic level, which takes us back to our earlier points about adjusting the message to the audience profile. Some topics need more development sentences than others and don’t easily divide in the middle, though a paragraph of ten sentences or more can really be pushing it. No matter what the size, however, all paragraphs should follow the standard structure explained below so that readers at any level can easily find what they’re looking for.
Topic Sentence
The topic sentence states the main point or thesis of the paragraph and thus summarizes the small collection of sentences following it, so the reader can take in the whole before examining the parts. This direct-approach organization caters to the primacy effect in our psychology, whereby first impressions are the strongest and most memorable. Readers should thus be able to see how every sentence in any well-organized paragraph expands on something said in the topic sentence. In this particular paragraph, for example, you will see how the second sentence expands on the part in the topic sentence about accommodating the reader. The third sentence extends that idea to expand on the part in the topic sentence a