When you teach multi-paragraph writing effectively, your students begin to write in an organized and natural multi-paragraph form in all of their daily writing across the curriculum. Furthermore, when it’s time for a writing assessment, your students easily address...
What your students write about is one of the most important decisions you make in teaching writing. To a large degree, it defines (1) what you teach about writing, and (2) how you teach writing. Put simply, we can’t leave what our students write about to chance. By...
Have you ever glanced at the paragraphing on a piece of student writing and had a gut reaction? How accurate was your gut reaction? My guess is that your gut reaction was surprisingly accurate. I did not say perfectly accurate or even accurate, just surprisingly...
What is a paragraph? You must be able to answer that question for yourself to teach paragraph and multi-paragraph writing effectively. Well, congratulations! You are about to enter a rare and elite club of teachers who truly understand paragraphs. We are going to...
Point and Purpose in Paragraphs Point and purpose is the key to understanding types of paragraphs and kinds of paragraphs. In writing, the words point and purpose are almost synonymous. Your point is your purpose, and how you decide to make your point clear to your...
The idea of a paragraph is built around these three concepts: 1. Unity: Everything in a paragraph is connected, related, and relevant. As such, a paragraph forms a whole. A paragraph has oneness. 2. Coherence: Paragraphs must be clear, understandable, and easily...
You ask, “What is a paragraph and how do you teach children to write a paragraph?” Here’s how! Patiently, very patiently, I explained to the eager young ears, "A paragraph is a group of sentences about one main idea or one topic. A paragraph usually contains between...
Paragraphs have unity and coherence. In short, paragraphs have a single-minded, organized focus. There must be no information in the paragraph which does not serve that purpose. We call these “good paragraphs.” The best of the best are known as “perfect paragraphs.”...
A Paragraph Beautifully Defined A paragraph is a collection of sentences with unity of purpose. A paragraph handles and exhausts a distinct topic. – Alexander Bain (1866) This description of a paragraph is about as good as it gets. People also credit Bain as the first...
We want our writing to flow naturally. We want our readers to feel that we know where we are headed and we are in control of our writing. This means they can sit back and enjoy the ride! We don’t want our readers to feel that we are jumping all over the place. We also...
