college writing from paragraph to essay answer key

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Zemach, D.E. and Rumisek, L.A. 2005 [2003]. Academic Writing from Paragraph to Essay. Oxford: Macmillan.

Reviewer: Yasmin Dar

10 July 2011

The coursebook is aimed at international students who are studying at an intermediate level. Its purpose is to offer guidance on how to write essays at an appropriate level for an academic environment such as a college or university. Its aim is to teach how to write sentences and then progress onto providing a framework for structuring paragraphs and essays. The model is a step-by-step process which includes clear examples and appropriate explanations followed by exercises which have an answer key. The coursebook is presented in a clear and logical way, e.g., the start of each new unit clearly and concisely sets out the intended learning outcomes. Each unit builds on the learning outcomes that have been covered in the previous units. Within each unit there are clear explanations of key terms and the system of recycling previous texts should ease the burden on students to process new topic- or context-specific information. There are useful topics related to the type of writing expected to be carried out at college e.g., personal statement for application to a university, two sample essay drafts as well as two sample CVs. However, these particular topics are placed in the additional materials section. Students are provided with relevant language structures that are useful for improving their grammar in essay writing, as well as useful photocopiable material that should help students to self-evaluate specific areas of their essay.

Potential issues could be related to the type of texts used in the coursebook to teach the following elements for academic writing: firstly, to learn how to develop a paragraph, the reader is presented with a text which is written for a brochure in a health club context. It could be argued that this type of writing is typically informal and not normally written for an academic audience. Secondly, to illustrate paragraph development the reader is presented with a style of text (p.18) in a context of ‘a first date’ where the writer draws on personal experience. This is a potential pitfall due to the inappropriate context for certain cultures. In academic contexts, students are usually expected and encouraged to illustrate/support their opinion by citing an academic source. Students would have benefited from a unit on how to find and reference academic sources in an academic text. Thirdly, to learn how to write a ‘compare and contrast’ essay, students are presented with an email context, which is not normally used for this purpose. Finally, to learn how to write a ‘process paragraph’ (p.29), the context of a recipe is presented for students to find topic and concluding sentences. Thus, there appears to be a contradiction with the authors’ claim that in units 1 to 6, students will ‘analyse and write the type of paragraphs that commonly occur in academic contexts’ (iv) due to the specific concerns highlighted in this section.

Overall, however, there is clear evidence of classroom exercises that are underpinned by process writing methodology and I would recommend Academic Writing from Paragraph to Essay .

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4.4: Organically Structured Essays

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• Lumen Learning

Learning Objective

• Identify characteristics of organically structured essays

In high school, the SAT and other standardized testing formats value a very rigid, formulaic approach to essay writing. Some students who have mastered that form, and enjoyed a lot of success from doing so, assume that college writing is simply more of the same. The skills involved in a very basic kind of essay—often called the five-paragraph theme—are indispensable. If you’re good at the five-paragraph theme, then you’re good at identifying a clear and consistent thesis, arranging cohesive paragraphs, organizing evidence for key points, and situating an argument within a broader context through the introduction and conclusion.

In college, you will build on and move beyond those essential formulaic skills. Your college professors are looking for a more ambitious and arguable thesis, a nuanced and compelling argument, and real-life evidence for all key points, all in an organically structured paper.

Link to Learning

This resource from the UNC Writing Center explains how college writing differs from writing in high school.

The figures below contrast the standard five-paragraph theme and the organic college paper. The five-paragraph theme, outlined on the left, is probably what you’re used to: the introductory paragraph starts broadly and gradually narrows to a thesis, which readers expect to find at the very end of that paragraph. In this format, the thesis invokes the magic number of three: three reasons why a statement is true. Each of those reasons is explained and justified in the three body paragraphs, and then the final paragraph restates the thesis before gradually getting broader. This format is easy for readers to follow, and it helps developing writers organize their points and the evidence that goes with them. That’s why you learned it.

The figure on the right represents a paper on the same topic that has the more organic form expected in college. The first key difference is the thesis. Rather than simply positing a number of reasons to think that something is true, the thesis in an organic essay puts forward an arguable statement: one with which a reasonable person might disagree. An arguable thesis gives the paper purpose. It surprises readers and draws them in. You hope your reader thinks, Huh. Why would the author come to that conclusion? and then feels compelled to read on. The body paragraphs, then, build on one another to carry out this ambitious argument.

In the classic five-paragraph theme it hardly matters which of the three reasons you explain first or second. In the more organic structure, each paragraph specifically leads to the next. The last key difference is seen in the conclusion. Because the organic essay is driven by an ambitious, non-obvious argument, the reader comes to the concluding section thinking, OK, I’m convinced by the argument. What do you, author, make of it? Why does it matter? The conclusion of an organically structured paper has a real job to do. It doesn’t just reiterate the thesis; it explains why the thesis matters. Some instructors will call this the so what? Given what you’ve argued in your essay, so what? What the takeaway or the call to action?

Five Paragraph Essay vs. organic essay

Compare the five-paragraph model on the left with the organic model on the right.

The substantial time you spent mastering the five-paragraph form was time well spent; it’s hard to imagine anyone succeeding with the more organic form without the organizational skills and habits of mind inherent in the simpler form. But if you assume that you must adhere rigidly to the simpler form, you’re blunting your intellectual ambition. Your professors will not be impressed by obvious theses, loosely related body paragraphs, and repetitive conclusions. They want you to undertake an ambitious, independent analysis, one that will yield a thesis that is somewhat surprising and challenging to explain.

https://assessments.lumenlearning.co...sessments/5603

Understanding that college writing will demand more than a five-paragraph essay is the first step. But then what? How do writers move beyond the formulas that are so familiar and well-practiced and begin to develop organic writing?

A good starting place is to recharacterize writing as thinking. Experienced writers don’t figure out what they want to say and then write it. They write in order to figure out what they want to say. Experienced writers develop theses in dialog with the body of the essay. An initial characterization of the problem leads to a tentative thesis. Then, drafting the body of the paper reveals thorny contradictions or critical areas of ambiguity, prompting the writer to revisit or expand the body of evidence and then refine the thesis based on that fresh look. The revised thesis may require that body paragraphs be reordered and reshaped to fit the emerging thesis. Throughout the process, the thesis serves as an anchor point while the author wades through the morass of facts and ideas. The writer continues to read to learn more about his or her issue and refines his or her ideas in response to what is learned. The dialogue between thesis and body continues until the author is satisfied or the due date arrives, whatever comes first.

Consider the following example.

Your political science professor asks you to write a paper on legislative redistricting. The professor spent a lot of time in class talking about motivations for redistricting, state redistricting laws, and Supreme Court redistricting cases. You decide to write about those three topics using the following thesis:

Legislative redistricting is a complicated process that involves motivations for redistricting, state redistricting laws, and Supreme Court decisions.

Then you write a section on motivations, a section on state laws, and a section on Supreme Court decisions.

On the first draft of the paper, the professor comments: “This paper tries to cover too much and has no point to make. What’s the original point you are trying to defend? You are just restating everything we said about redistricting in class. Keep thinking.” You realize at this point that you have tried to write a five-paragraph essay, and it doesn’t work.

You go back to the drawing board. Your professor said you needed an arguable, original point and to avoid just restating everything from class. You think about what interested you most in the discussion of redistricting and remember talking about the Goldilocks principle of getting the balance of voters “just right.” You also remember that the professor mentioned a current case before the Supreme Court involving your home state.

You research the case and decide to revise your thesis to argue that your state has not achieved the Goldilocks balance but has erred on the side of excessive racial representation in some districts. Rather than using the body paragraphs of the paper to give three reasons for why that overrepresentation occurred, you decide to first give background on the racial divisions within the state, followed by profiles of two districts where over-representation of one race has occurred.

After writing those sections, you read further about the current status of the Supreme Court case and find that one of the districts you discuss in the paper isn’t involved in the case and that the Court’s decision has still not been handed down. You decide to rewrite one of the profile sections to focus on the district in the Supreme Court case. Then you add a section overviewing the current court case. You use your conclusion to make a recommendation to the Supreme Court about how the case should be decided.

Once the conclusion is drafted, you go back to the introduction and tighten the thesis to focus just on the two districts covered in the court case. You also revise the initial background section to include specific mention of those two cases. Now you are writing like a college writer, using writing as a tool for thinking and developing the paper in response to your growing understanding.

An organically structured argument is a beautiful thing. For one, it gives a paper authentic momentum. The first paragraph doesn’t just start with some broad, vague statement; every sentence is crucial for setting up the thesis. The body paragraphs build on one another, moving through each step of the logical chain. Each paragraph leads inevitably to the next, making the transitions from paragraph to paragraph feel wholly natural. The conclusion, instead of being a mirror-image paraphrase of the introduction, builds out the argument by explaining the broader implications. It offers new insight, without departing from the flow of the analysis.

A paper with this kind of momentum may read like it was knocked out in one inspired sitting. But don’t be fooled In reality, just like accomplished athletes and artists, masterful writers make the difficult look easy. As writer Anne Lamott notes, reading a well-written piece feels like its author sat down and typed it out, “bounding along like huskies across the snow.” However, she continues,

This is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. [1]

https://assessments.lumenlearning.co...sessments/5604 https://assessments.lumenlearning.co...essments/20430

• Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 21. ↵

Contributors and Attributions

• Practice: Organically Structured Essays. Provided by : University of Mississippi. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Revision and Adaptation. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Moving beyond the five-paragraph theme.. Authored by : Amy Guptill.. Provided by : The College at Brockport, SUNY. Located at : textbooks.opensuny.org/writing-in-college-from-competence-to-excellence/. Project : Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence. . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Organic and Inorganic. Authored by : John D.. Located at : https://www.flickr.com/photos/john-pa/6425182999/ . License : CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
• Three-story theses and the organically structured argument. Authored by : Amy Guptill. Provided by : The College at Brockport, SUNY. Located at : textbooks.opensuny.org/writing-in-college-from-competence-to-excellence/. Project : Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

6 Back to Basics: The Perfect Paragraph

As Michael Harvey writes, paragraphs are “in essence—a form of punctuation, and like other forms of punctuation they are meant to make written material easy to read.” [1] Effective paragraphs are the fundamental units of academic writing; consequently, the thoughtful, multifaceted arguments that your professors expect depend on them. Without good paragraphs, you simply cannot clearly convey sequential points and their relationships to one another. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight strategies for constructing, ordering, and relating paragraphs in academic writing. It could just as well be titled “Organization” because whether or not readers perceive a paper to be well organized depends largely on effective paragraphing.

Many novice writers tend to make a sharp distinction between content and style, thinking that a paper can be strong in one and weak in the other, but focusing on organization shows how content and style converge in deliberative academic writing. A poorly organized paper may contain insightful kernels, but a thoughtful, satisfying argument can’t take shape without paragraphs that are crafted, ordered, and connected effectively. On the other side, one can imagine a string of slick, error-free sentences that are somehow lacking in interesting ideas. However, your professors will view even the most elegant prose as rambling and tedious if there isn’t a careful, coherent argument to give the text meaning. Paragraphs are the “stuff” of academic writing and, thus, worth our attention here.

Key sentences (a.k.a. topic sentences)

In academic writing, readers expect each paragraph to have a sentence or two that captures its main point. They’re often called “topic sentences,” though many writing instructors prefer to call them “key sentences.” There are at least two downsides of the phrase “topic sentence.” First, it makes it seem like the paramount job of that sentence is simply to announce the topic of the paragraph. Second, it makes it seem like the topic sentence must always be a single grammatical sentence. Calling it a “key sentence” reminds us that it expresses the central idea of the paragraph. And sometimes a question or a two-sentence construction functions as the key.

The key to staying on topic within a paragraph is starting with a topic sentence. It doesn’t even have to be perfect to work from it! Just figure out what you really want to say in that one specific paragraph and go. Then, you … EDIT (haha, made you flinch!) All joking aside, editing really is a very important step in this process. By going back over what you wrote, you can check to see if what you wrote in that paragraph fits with what you actually intend to say as well as to make sure everything is cohesive and coherent!

Kaethe Leonard

Key sentences in academic writing do two things. First, they establish the main point that the rest of the paragraph supports. Second, they situate each paragraph within the sequence of the argument, a task that requires transitioning from the prior paragraph. Consider these two examples: [2]

Now we turn to the epidemiological evidence.

The epidemiological evidence provides compelling support for the hypothesis emerging from etiological studies.

Both versions convey a topic; it’s pretty easy to predict that the paragraph will be about epidemiological evidence, but only the second version establishes an argumentative point and puts it in context. The paragraph doesn’t just describe the epidemiological evidence; it shows how epidemiology is telling the same story as etiology. Similarly, while Version A doesn’t relate to anything in particular, Version B immediately suggests that the prior paragraph addresses the biological pathway (i.e. etiology) of a disease and that the new paragraph will bolster the emerging hypothesis with a different kind of evidence. As a reader, it’s easy to keep track of how the paragraph about cells and chemicals and such relates to the paragraph about populations in different places.

By clearly establishing an essential point within its analytic context, a well written key sentence gives both you and your reader a firm grasp of how each point relates. For example, compare these two sets of key sentences, each introducing a sequential paragraph: [3]

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the cause of the disease was unclear. …

The cause of AIDS is HIV. …

There are skeptics who question whether HIV is the cause. …

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the cause of the disease was unclear, leading to a broad range of scientific speculation. …

By 1986 HIV had been isolated and found to correlate almost exactly with the incidence of AIDS. …

HIV skeptics, on the other hand, sought to discredit claims based on epidemiology by emphasizing that the pathogenesis of HIV was still unknown. …

Version A isn’t wrong per se; it just illustrates a lost opportunity to show the important connections among points. Both versions portray a process unfolding over time: initial uncertainty followed by a breakthrough discovery and then controversy. Even with the same substantive points, a person reading Version A would have to work harder to see how the material in the paragraphs connects. Readers experience Version B as clearer and more engaging.

Thinking of key sentences as sequential points in an argument reminds one that a key sentence doesn’t have to always be a single declarative one. Sometimes you need two sentences together to achieve the work of a key sentence, and sometimes a question or quotation does a better job than a declarative sentence in clarifying a logical sequence:

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic the cause was unclear. Virologists, bacteriologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists all pursued different leads, reflecting their particular areas of expertise…

If drug use, lifestyle, and “immune overload” didn’t cause AIDS, what did?…

“I’ve asked questions they apparently can’t answer,” claimed retrovirologist Peter Duesberg [4] who became an oft-quoted skeptical voice in media accounts of AIDS research in the mid-1980s. …

Version C is based on the same three sequential points as Versions A and B: (1) the cause of AIDS was initially unclear (2) HIV was accepted as the cause (3) lone dissenters questioned the claims. However, versions B and C have much more meaning and momentum, and version C, depending on the nature of the argument, features more precise and lively stylistic choices. Opening the second paragraph with a question (that then gets answered) carries forth the sense of befuddlement that researchers initially experienced and helps to convey why the discovery of HIV was a hugely important turning point. Using the self-glorifying Duesberg quote to launch the third paragraph makes the point about lingering skepticism while also introducing a portrait of a leading figure among the skeptics. While Version B is effective as well, Version C illustrates some of the more lively choices available to academic writers.

A last thing to note about key sentences is that academic readers expect them to be at the beginning of the paragraph. [5] That helps readers comprehend your argument. To see how, try this: find an academic piece (such as a textbook or scholarly article) that strikes you as well written and go through part of it reading just the first sentence of each paragraph. You should be able to easily follow the sequence of logic. When you’re writing for professors, it is especially effective to put your key sentences first because they usually convey your own original thinking, which, as you’ve read here, is exactly what your instructors are looking for in your work. It’s a very good sign when your paragraphs are typically composed of a telling key sentence followed by evidence and explanation.

Knowing this convention of academic writing can help you both read and write more effectively. When you’re reading a complicated academic piece for the first time, you might want to go through reading only the first sentence or two of each paragraph to get the overall outline of the argument. Then you can go back and read all of it with a clearer picture of how each of the details fit in. [6] And when you’re writing, you may also find it useful to write the first sentence of each paragraph (instead of a topic-based outline) to map out a thorough argument before getting immersed in sentence-level wordsmithing. For example, compare these two scaffolds. Which one would launch you into a smoother drafting process?: [7]

Version A (Outline Of Topics):

I. Granovetter’s “Strength of weak ties” a. Definition b. Example—getting jobs II. Creativity in social networks a. Explanation b. Richard Florida’s argument III. Implications a. For urban planners b. For institutions of higher education

Version B (Key-Sentence Sketch):

The importance of networking for both career development and social change is well known. Granovetter (1973) explains that weak ties—that is, ties among acquaintances—are often more useful in job hunting because they connect job-seekers to a broader range of people and workplaces. …

Subsequent research in network analysis has shown that weak ties can promote creativity by bringing ideas together from different social realms. …

Richard Florida (2002) argues that cities would do well to facilitate weak ties in order to recruit members of the “creative class” and spur economic development. …

Florida’s argument can inspire a powerful new approach to strategic planning within colleges and universities as well. …

As you can see, emphasizing key sentences in both the process and product of academic writing is one way to ensure that your efforts stay focused on developing your argument and communicating your own original thinking in a clear, logical way.

A good paper has cohesion. I love outlines, so I really like the idea of writing my first sentence of each paragraph as my plan. This way, you know what to write about and you know that your paper will flow easily. As a reader, this is an important characteristic to me. If the paragraphs are just jumping around in all different directions, I quickly lose interest in trying to follow along. The reader should not have to struggle to follow your paper. Flow can make the difference between an okay paper and a scholarly product.

Cohesion and coherence

With a key sentence established, the next task is to shape the body of your paragraph to be both cohesive and coherent. As Williams and Bizup [8] explain, cohesion is about the “sense of flow” (how each sentence fits with the next), while coherence is about the “sense of the whole”. [9] Some students worry too much about “flow” and spend a lot of time on sentence-level issues to promote it. I encourage you to focus on underlying structure. For the most part, a text reads smoothly when it conveys a thoughtful and well organized argument or analysis. Focus first and most on your ideas, on crafting an ambitious analysis. The most useful guides advise you to first focus on getting your ideas on paper and then revising for organization and wordsmithing later, refining the analysis as you go. Thus, I discuss creating cohesion and coherent paragraphs here as if you already have some rough text written and are in the process of smoothing out your prose to clarify your argument for both your reader and yourself.

Cohesion refers to the flow from sentence to sentence. For example, compare these passages:

Version A (That I Rewrote):

Granovetter begins by looking at balance theory. If an actor, A, is strongly tied to both B and C, it is extremely likely that B and C are, sooner or later, going to be tied to each other, according to balance theory (1973:1363). [10] Bridge ties between cliques are always weak ties, Granovetter argues (1973:1364). Weak ties may not necessarily be bridges, but Granovetter argues that bridges will be weak. If two actors share a strong tie, they will draw in their other strong relations and will eventually form a clique. Only weak ties that do not have the strength to draw together all the “friends of friends” can connect people in different cliques.

Version B (The Original By Giuffre):

Granovetter begins by looking at balance theory. In brief, balance theory tells us that if an actor, A, is strongly tied to both B and C, it is extremely likely that B and C are, sooner or later, going to be tied to each other (1973:1363). Granovetter argues that because of this, bridge ties between cliques are always weak ties (1973:1364). Weak ties may not necessarily be bridges, but Granovetter argues that bridges will be weak. This is because if two actors share a strong tie, they will draw in their other strong relations and will eventually form a clique. The only way, therefore, that people in different cliques can be connected is through weak ties that do not have the strength to draw together all the “friends of friends.” [11]

Version A has the exact same information as version B, but it is harder to read because it is less cohesive. Each sentence in version B begins with old information and bridges to new information. Here’s Version B again with the relevant parts emboldened:

Granovetter begins by looking at balance theory. In brief, balance theory tells us that if an actor, A, is strongly tied to both B and C, it is extremely likely that B and C are, sooner or later, going to be tied to each other (1973:1363). Granovetter argues that because of this, bridge ties between cliques are always weak ties (1973:1364). Weak ties may not necessarily be bridges, but Granovetter argues that bridges will be weak. This is because if two actors share a strong tie, they will draw in their other strong relations and will eventually form a clique. The only way, therefore, that people in different cliques can be connected is through weak ties that do not have the strength to draw together all the “friends of friends.”

The first sentence establishes the key idea of balance theory. The next sentence begins with balance theory and ends with social ties, which is the focus of the third sentence. The concept of weak ties connects the third and fourth sentences and concept of cliques the fifth and sixth sentences. In Version A, in contrast, the first sentence focuses on balance theory, but then the second sentence makes a new point about social ties before telling the reader that the point comes from balance theory. The reader has to take in a lot of unfamiliar information before learning how it fits in with familiar concepts. Version A is coherent, but the lack of cohesion makes it tedious to read.

The lesson is this: if you or others perceive a passage you’ve written to be awkward or choppy, even though the topic is consistent, try rewriting it to ensure that each sentence begins with a familiar term or concept. If your points don’t naturally daisy-chain together like the examples given here, consider numbering them. For example, you may choose to write, “Proponents of the legislation point to four major benefits.” Then you could discuss four loosely related ideas without leaving your reader wondering how they relate.

While cohesion is about the sense of flow; coherence is about the sense of the whole . For example, here’s a passage that is cohesive (from sentence to sentence) but lacks coherence:

Your social networks and your location within them shape the kinds and amount of information that you have access to. Information is distinct from data, in that makes some kind of generalization about a person, thing, or population. Defensible generalizations about society can be either probabilities (i.e., statistics) or patterns (often from qualitative analysis). Such probabilities and patterns can be temporal, spatial, or simultaneous.

Each sentence in the above passage starts with a familiar idea and progresses to a new one, but it lacks coherence—a sense of being about one thing. Good writers often write passages like that when they’re free-writing or using the drafting stage to cast a wide net for ideas. A writer weighing the power and limits of social network analysis may free-write something like that example and, from there, develop a more specific plan for summarizing key insights about social networks and then discussing them with reference to the core tenets of social science. As a draft, an incoherent paragraph often points to a productive line of reasoning; one just has to continue thinking it through in order to identify a clear argumentative purpose for each paragraph. With its purpose defined, each paragraph, then, becomes a lot easier to write. Coherent paragraphs aren’t just about style; they are a sign of a thoughtful, well developed analysis.

The wind-up

Some guides advise you to end each paragraph with a specific concluding sentence , in a sense, to treat each paragraph as a kind of mini-essay. But that’s not a widely held convention. Most well written academic pieces don’t adhere to that structure. The last sentence of the paragraph should certainly be in your own words (as in, not a quote), but as long as the paragraph succeeds in carrying out the task that it has been assigned by its key sentence, you don’t need to worry about whether that last sentence has an air of conclusiveness. For example, consider these paragraphs about the cold fusion controversy of the 1980s that appeared in a best-selling textbook: [12]

The experiment seemed straightforward and there were plenty of scientists willing to try it. Many did. It was wonderful to have a simple laboratory experiment on fusion to try after the decades of embarrassing attempts to control hot fusion. This effort required multi-billion dollar machines whose every success seemed to be capped with an unanticipated failure. ‘Cold fusion’ seemed to provide, as Martin Fleischmann said during the course of that famous Utah press conference, ‘another route’—the route of little science.

In that example, the first and last sentences in the paragraph are somewhat symmetrical: the authors introduce the idea of accessible science, contrast it with big science, and bring it back to the phrase “little science.” Here’s an example from the same chapter of the same book that does not have any particular symmetry: [13]

The struggle between proponents and critics in a scientific controversy is always a struggle for credibility. When scientists make claims which are literally ‘incredible’, as in the cold fusion case, they face an uphill struggle. The problem Pons and Fleischmann had to overcome was that they had credibility as electrochemists but not as nuclear physicists. And it was nuclear physics where their work was likely to have its main impact.

The last sentence of the paragraph doesn’t mirror the first, but the paragraph still works just fine. In general, every sentence of academic writing should add some unique content. Don’t trouble yourself with having the last sentence in every paragraph serve as a mini-conclusion. Instead, worry about developing each point sufficiently and making your logical sequence clear.

Conclusion: paragraphs as punctuation

To reiterate the initial point, it is useful to think of paragraphs as punctuation that organize your ideas in a readable way. Each paragraph should be an irreplaceable node within a coherent sequence of logic. Thinking of paragraphs as “building blocks” evokes the “five-paragraph theme” structure explained in Chapter 2 : if you have identical stone blocks, it hardly matters what order they’re in. In the successful organically structured college paper, the structure and tone of each paragraph reflects its indispensable role within the overall piece. These goals—making every bit count and having each part situated within the whole—also anchor the discussion in the next chapter: how to write introductions and conclusions that frame—rather than simply book-end—your analysis.

Other resources

• Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing 2nd ed . (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2013) is another short and affordable guide. His discussion of paragraphing is among the many gems in the book.
• Online resources from university writing centers offer a lot of great information about effective paragraphing and topic sentences. I especially admire this one from Indiana University, this one from Colorado State, and this one from the University of Richmond.
• In addition to Williams’ and Bizup’s excellent lesson on cohesion and coherence in Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace 12th ed. (New York: Longman, 2014) , check out this site at George Mason University, this handout from Duke University, and this resource from Clarkson University.
• Find a piece of academic writing you admire and copy down the first sentence of each paragraph. How well do those sentences reflect the flow of the argument? Show those sentences to other people; how clearly can they envision the flow of the piece?
• The Roman siege of Masada in the first century CE, ending as it did with the suicide of 960 Jewish rebels, has been interpreted in various ways in Jewish history. History is best understood as a product of the present: the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our complicated world. History lessons in elementary school curricula, however, rarely move beyond facts and timelines.
• Polar explorer Earnest Shackleton is often considered a model of effective leadership. The Endurance was frozen into the Antarctic ice where it was subsequently crushed, abandoning Shackleton and his 22-person crew on unstable ice floes, hundreds of miles from any human outpost. Two harrowing journeys by lifeboat and several long marches over the ice over the course of two Antarctic winters eventually resulted in their rescue. Amazingly, no one died during the ordeal.
• A recent analysis of a 1.8 million year-old hominid skull suggests that human evolutionary lineage is simpler than we thought. Homo erectus , a species that persisted almost 2 million years, lived in most parts of Africa as well as Western and Eastern Asia. Some scientists are now arguing that Homo erectus individuals varied widely in their body size and skull shape, a claim strongly supported by the recently analyzed skull. Thus, some other named species, such as Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are not separate species but instead regional variations of Homo erectus .
• Rewrite the passages you identified to make them more cohesive.
• Michael Harvey, The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, Second Edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2013), 70. ↵
• Etiology is the cause of a disease—what’s actually happening in cells and tissues—while epidemiology is the incidence of a disease in a population. ↵
• This example is drawn from key points from Steven Epstein’s Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996) . An excellent read. ↵
• This Duesberg quote is from Epstein, Impure Science , 112. ↵
• This sentence right here is an example! ↵
• I hesitate to add that this first-sentence trick is also a good one for when you haven’t completed an assigned reading and only have 10 minutes before class. Reading just the first sentence of each paragraph will quickly tell you a lot about the assigned text. ↵
• This example is from Katherine Giuffre, Communities and Networks: Using Social Network Analysis to Rethink Urban and Community Studies (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013). ↵
• Joseph M. Williams.and Joseph Bizup. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace 12th edition (New York: Longman, 2016), 68. ↵
• Ibid., 71. ↵
• The quote uses a version of an ASA-style in-text citation for Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360-80. ↵
• Guiffre. Communities and Networks , 98. ↵
• Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What You Should Know About Science 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Canto, 1998), 58. ↵
• Ibid., 74. ↵

Writing in College Copyright © 2016 by Amy Guptill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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1 Chapter 1: An Introduction to College Writing

In all likelihood, college-level writing will be different from other forms of writing students might have done in the past. This is because academic writing (as opposed to personal writing or creative writing) consists of writing that exists for a school-like or college-based setting. While many students have written essays for classes in the past, they might have been given a wide range of latitude in their assignments. Essays that are written for college classes and for professional contexts typically shift the focus away from the student (or employee) and onto the priorities of the readers.

ACADEMIC WRITING

Overview: Unlike personal writing, academic writing is not about you, the author. Instead, it is about answering a particular assignment, in a particular situation, for a particular reader. For the most part, academic writing exists for a readership that is different  from the writer. Because academic writing exists for other people , the expectations and requirements of those other people tend to dictate the form and scope of an academic essay.

Most importantly, academic writing tends to be about what the student can prove, or what the student has learned from outside sources, and not about what the student feels . Sometimes this need for proof will take the form of taking a handful of ‘given’ or axiomatic facts and assembling them logically into a written work that resembles a ‘proof’ from geometry.

• Socrates is a man, and
• All men are mortal, therefore
• Socrates is mortal

Other times, very little will be given, and it will be the responsibility of the student to establish not just the argument but the conditions of the argument.

One of the first things that a college-level writer should consider is what goals an instructor might have had for assigning an essay. Because most college-level essays are not intended to be read by a large population of people, these assignments tend to be given for the sake of the assignment itself. Even if the instructor says “write a letter to the editor of a newspaper for a general audience,” what the instructor probably means is “write a letter to the editor of a newspaper for what I think a general audience should be like .” At the same time, the student writer should consider what might be learned from completing the assignment.

Application: In some ways, academic writing is a kind of ‘training’ or ‘practice.’ It often involves practicing skills taught during class, and it also involves applying the content of the class in a new context. Even if the student does not feel the essay ‘does anything,’ it is uncommon for essays in an academic setting to be ‘busywork.’ When a tennis player practices forehands (even though there is no ‘game’ going on) or a weightlifter lifts in order to condition muscles (as opposed to, say, helping a friend to move into a new apartment), it’s not busywork. The application of the skills and the development of the physical tools are, ultimately, the point. They are practice. Academic writing, like many college assignments, is about the development of mental tools.

In other words, a term paper in a college class is a great way for an instructor to make sure that the student has learned, at least temporarily, enough about the subject to write the term paper. The instructor wants students to show that they have thought about the subject and understood it, so a short paragraph that simply repeats a point the instructor made in class lecture is unlikely to fulfill the instructor’s goals. Be careful to look at any assignment and to understand its context (i.e. the teacher who assigns the paper, the class the paper is assigned in, and the stated goals of that class).

What to Avoid: Try not to make the writing personal. Maybe you will have a teacher who encourages you to introduce more of yourself into an essay, but it is usually safer to begin from a more neutral and more balanced perspective. This does not mean that academic writing has to be boring–it means that it needs to appeal to multiple readers, and not just the tastes of one writer. Academic writing asks for things like evidence and proof, and students who rely too heavily on personal opinion run the risk of writing for themselves, instead of for their readers. Most of the time, the writing assignment is about the process (i.e. the thought that goes into writing) and not the product (i.e. the five-page thing you turn in the next day).

WRITING FOR OTHERS

Probably more than at any other point in history, writing has become a personal activity. Social media encourages us to express our own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. We write about personal experiences, and we are accountable only in the general sense that others might (or might not) care about what we have written. However, even here an echo chamber is created, where those who like to read our feelings do, and those who do not share these ideas simply go somewhere else and listen to the voices that they do like.

Academic writing is not about the personal. It is not about writers, and the students writing academic essays don’t have the option of saying “if you don’t like it, just don’t read it.” Truthfully, academic writing is only partially about readers. Instead, it is about presenting valid and reliable information to our readers. This means that even if an academic essay might make its readers happy, if it does not represent facts accurately, it is still flawed. We are accountable to give those who receive our messages accurate information in a form that they can understand, and this requires a change in mindset.

Overview: Typically, a piece of writing can be thought of as existing for the sake of the writer (like a personal journal or a grocery list) or for the sake of a reader (like a set of instructions or an exam essay). Knowing who will read the essay lets a writer know what can and cannot be assumed about a subject. For example, a recipe for cookies probably does not need to educate readers on what a cookie  is,  and probably does not even need to include a review on how to turn on an oven. It  might  need an explanation of certain terms (like ‘creaming’). It  probably will need a list of ingredients. By contrast, an essay on the history of the chocolate chip cookie might need a few sentences establishing the historical context, but it does not need to launch into a complete history of World War II (during which time the cookies became very popular).

Good writers keep in mind at all times who will be reading their work and how those readers will be using the work. In the above example, the person writing the cookie recipe can be pretty sure that the reader will be making cookies, but will probably be a little less certain about what the future baker’s personal tastes are going to be (or where the baker might live). This might result in additional directions about how to substitute chocolate candies for chocolate chips or how to adjust for baking at a higher altitude.

Application: A college-level essay usually has multiple readers, but the ultimate reality is that there is one reader that matters more than others—the person grading the essay. What this means is that a student writer needs to consider what reasons the instructor might have had for assigning the essay. These reasons might not be stated aloud. Maybe the assigned “goal” of the essay is to “teach your readers about the meaning of marriage in  Twelfth Night ,” but as far as a student is concerned, the “goal” of the essay is to get a decent grade. Remember, though that as far as the instructor is concerned, the “goal” of the essay is to make sure that each student has at least some practice with analysis. In other words, the way for a student to get that “decent grade” is to show the instructor the skill that is being asked for—in this case, analysis.

In this case, there are three goals, and they work together. The teacher gets the student to practice analysis (goal one) by assigning a paper on  Twelfth Night . The student writes about  Twelfth Night  (goal two) as a way of motivating the teacher to assign a high grade (goal three).

What to Avoid: Do not write the essay for the wrong readers. Writing an essay that a parent, a significant other, or a roommate likes is not the same thing as writing an essay that meets an instructor’s expectations. Most importantly, do not write the essay in a vacuum. Make sure that you do not assume that just because one of your instructors in high school always let you get away with poor use of punctuation because “it’s the ideas that count” does not mean that your new instructor (or, in another setting, your employer) will agree.

CREATING A CONNECTION

Even two people with most things in common (imagine, say, siblings—who share parents, schools, neighbors, culture, etc.) sometimes have breakdowns in communication. People with the best of intentions often struggle to understand one another. When Person A talks to Person B, sometimes differences in how words are defined, how facts are viewed, and how issues are weighed can lead to disagreement. Because academic writing is for others, overcoming the ‘disconnect’ is the responsibility of the writer.

Overview: Being disconnected happens when the person trying to communicate fails to do so because something else (another idea, another person, or even just time or culture) gets in the way. Sometimes, it’s a matter of definition. If I refer to a specific professional athlete as a “great” player, what is my threshold for great? Do I mean the player is better that average? Better than the person playing the same position for my team? One of the best alive? One of the best all-time? All could be ‘great,’ and knowing which one of those definitions I mean could help prevent a disagreement.

Sometimes, being disconnected comes about because the writer makes an assumption about how facts are viewed. Imagine that the writer finds an authoritative statement from a world leader that says “X is very, very bad” as a way of trying to convince the reader to stop doing it. The reader might agree that the politician said exactly that; however, if the reader voted against the politician and really dislikes the stance of that politician’s political party, then the quotation actually serves an opposite purpose.

Finally, writer and reader alike might largely agree on definitions and viewpoint, but they disagree on what is of the greatest importance. Perhaps they might agree that the household budget needs to be cut, and they agree that the best place to start is with the luxuries they have in their budget. However, one person considers the cable bill to be a luxury and the other thinks that it’s time to switch to generic soft drinks, instead of Pepsi or Coke (or, perhaps, it’s time to cut soft drinks completely).

Application: In college-level writing, it’s essential that the student writer establish a connection with potential readers (see  Writing for Others ). One of the best ways to do this is to spend some time thinking like the reader. If the student has an argument, he or she should wonder what reasons people might have for disagreeing with that argument. Moreover, all students should spend some time thinking about the assumptions that they make.

Many cases of being disconnected come not from deliberate moves, but rather from what the writer doesn’t think about. Student writers will frequently find it useful to clarify how key terms will be used during an essay. Likewise, they might find it useful to explain what they  will not be addressing. For example, an argument about tuition in college is likely to be emotionally taxing enough, so a student might explain that while debates about student loan programs are valid, they will not be the focus of the given essay.

What to Avoid: The most important for student writers to avoid is the assumption. Student writers will frequently make the mistake of assuming that something they believe is either true or at least widely accepted by most people.  Almost as important is for the student writer not to fall into the trap of thinking “I explained everything fine, so it’s the reader’s fault if he or she doesn’t understand my point. Not my problem.” Because academic writing exists for the reader, the burden is on the writer. Failing to connect with your audience  is  your problem.

TYPES OF ASSIGNMENTS

As was mentioned before, very little college writing is initiated by students. Instead, a typical piece of college writing is a response to an instructor’s assignment. The vast majority of these assignments are information-based (the instructor wants the student to report information), with both analysis and argumentation filling secondary rolls. Understanding the ways these goals interact is important for college writers.

Overview: In the past, students might have encountered general categories of writing like  informative ,  persuasive , or  narrative.  Other times, students might have encountered the  five paragraph theme . What’s important to remember about these categories is that they are not exclusive, and that the goals often overlap. Imagine a tiger—is it a striped animal, a furred animal, or a clawed animal? It is difficult to inform readers without  persuading  them that the information is correct, and it is really difficult to create a narrative that contains no information.

Types and categories are only useful when they help us, and they are spectacularly not useful when we assume that the mental boxes we used to sort things a few years ago are the same categories that apply now.

Application: When writing, student writers need to let the assignment and the content dictate their organizational pattern. Many times, an idea that would fit into a 5-paragraph essay format for a high school class will, in fact, require vastly greater development in college; suddenly, there are more than five paragraphs. Likewise, while the  student  might prefer it if all assignments fit nicely into modes that have been learned in the past, the most common mode found in a college essay is the  challenging paper . Instructors often deliberately construct assignments that combine paper types and that ask for the student to do new things.

The teacher is not being difficult for the sake of being difficult (well, probably not, anyway). However, remember the purpose of college writing—the teacher is trying to use the writing assignment as a way of getting at some other, probably more important—skill or issue. In other words, the point of the assignment is to learn something. An assignment that exists only on one level is likely to let the student fall back into ‘auto pilot’ mode and stop learning.

What to Avoid: Do not assume that papers exist in separate boxes. The truth of the matter is that most college papers are going to consist of multiple “modes” or “formats” at the same time. More importantly, the rules that work for one teacher might not work for another. Because the two top goals should be to learn and to do well on the assignment, a student writer needs to look at what the teacher is asking for. If it fits a pattern that the student has already learned, that’s fine. Otherwise, students need to be able to adapt.

Writing Academic Arguments Copyright © by Joshua P. Sunderbruch. All Rights Reserved.

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College Writing

What this handout is about.

This handout will help you figure out what your college instructors expect when they give you a writing assignment. It will tell you how and why to move beyond the five-paragraph essays you learned to write in high school and start writing essays that are more analytical and more flexible.

What is a five-paragraph essay?

High school students are often taught to write essays using some variation of the five-paragraph model. A five-paragraph essay is hourglass-shaped: it begins with something general, narrows down in the middle to discuss specifics, and then branches out to more general comments at the end. In a classic five-paragraph essay, the first paragraph starts with a general statement and ends with a thesis statement containing three “points”; each body paragraph discusses one of those “points” in turn; and the final paragraph sums up what the student has written.

Why do high schools teach the five-paragraph model?

The five-paragraph model is a good way to learn how to write an academic essay. It’s a simplified version of academic writing that requires you to state an idea and support it with evidence. Setting a limit of five paragraphs narrows your options and forces you to master the basics of organization. Furthermore—and for many high school teachers, this is the crucial issue—many mandatory end-of-grade writing tests and college admissions exams like the SAT II writing test reward writers who follow the five-paragraph essay format.

Writing a five-paragraph essay is like riding a bicycle with training wheels; it’s a device that helps you learn. That doesn’t mean you should use it forever. Once you can write well without it, you can cast it off and never look back.

Why don’t five-paragraph essays work well for college writing?

The way college instructors teach is probably different from what you experienced in high school, and so is what they expect from you.

While high school courses tend to focus on the who, what, when, and where of the things you study—”just the facts”—college courses ask you to think about the how and the why. You can do very well in high school by studying hard and memorizing a lot of facts. Although college instructors still expect you to know the facts, they really care about how you analyze and interpret those facts and why you think those facts matter. Once you know what college instructors are looking for, you can see some of the reasons why five-paragraph essays don’t work so well for college writing:

• Five-paragraph essays often do a poor job of setting up a framework, or context, that helps the reader understand what the author is trying to say. Students learn in high school that their introduction should begin with something general. College instructors call these “dawn of time” introductions. For example, a student asked to discuss the causes of the Hundred Years War might begin, “Since the dawn of time, humankind has been plagued by war.” In a college course, the student would fare better with a more concrete sentence directly related to what he or she is going to say in the rest of the paper—for example, a sentence such as “In the early 14th century, a civil war broke out in Flanders that would soon threaten Western Europe’s balance of power.” If you are accustomed to writing vague opening lines and need them to get started, go ahead and write them, but delete them before you turn in the final draft. For more on this subject, see our handout on introductions .
• Five-paragraph essays often lack an argument. Because college courses focus on analyzing and interpreting rather than on memorizing, college instructors expect writers not only to know the facts but also to make an argument about the facts. The best five-paragraph essays may do this. However, the typical five-paragraph essay has a “listing” thesis, for example, “I will show how the Romans lost their empire in Britain and Gaul by examining military technology, religion, and politics,” rather than an argumentative one, for example, “The Romans lost their empire in Britain and Gaul because their opponents’ military technology caught up with their own at the same time as religious upheaval and political conflict were weakening the sense of common purpose on the home front.” For more on this subject, see our handout on argument .
• Five-paragraph essays are often repetitive. Writers who follow the five-paragraph model tend to repeat sentences or phrases from the introduction in topic sentences for paragraphs, rather than writing topic sentences that tie their three “points” together into a coherent argument. Repetitive writing doesn’t help to move an argument along, and it’s no fun to read.
• Five-paragraph essays often lack “flow.” Five-paragraph essays often don’t make smooth transitions from one thought to the next. The “listing” thesis statement encourages writers to treat each paragraph and its main idea as a separate entity, rather than to draw connections between paragraphs and ideas in order to develop an argument.
• Five-paragraph essays often have weak conclusions that merely summarize what’s gone before and don’t say anything new or interesting. In our handout on conclusions , we call these “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it” conclusions: they do nothing to engage readers and make them glad they read the essay. Most of us can remember an introduction and three body paragraphs without a repetitive summary at the end to help us out.
• Five-paragraph essays don’t have any counterpart in the real world. Read your favorite newspaper or magazine; look through the readings your professors assign you; listen to political speeches or sermons. Can you find anything that looks or sounds like a five-paragraph essay? One of the important skills that college can teach you, above and beyond the subject matter of any particular course, is how to communicate persuasively in any situation that comes your way. The five-paragraph essay is too rigid and simplified to fit most real-world situations.
• Perhaps most important of all: in a five-paragraph essay, form controls content, when it should be the other way around. Students begin with a plan for organization, and they force their ideas to fit it. Along the way, their perfectly good ideas get mangled or lost.

How do I break out of writing five-paragraph essays?

Let’s take an example based on our handout on thesis statements . Suppose you’re taking a course on contemporary communication, and the professor asks you to write a paper on this topic:

Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.

Thanks to your familiarity with the five paragraph essay structure and with the themes of your course, you are able to quickly write an introductory paragraph:

Social media allows the sharing of information through online networks among social connections. Everyone uses social media in our modern world for a variety of purposes: to learn about the news, keep up with friends, and even network for jobs. Social media cannot help but affect public awareness. In this essay, I will discuss the impact of social media on public awareness of political campaigns, public health initiatives, and current events.

Now you have something on paper. But you realize that this introduction sticks too close to the five-paragraph essay structure. The introduction starts too broadly by taking a step back and defining social media in general terms. Then it moves on to restate the prompt without quite addressing it: while it’s reasserted that there is an impact, the impact is not actually discussed. And the final sentence, instead of presenting an argument, only lists topics in sequence. You are prepared to write a paragraph on political campaigns, a paragraph on public health initiatives, and a paragraph on current events, but you aren’t sure what your point will be.

So you start again. Instead of trying to come up with something to say about each of three points, you brainstorm until you come up with a main argument, or thesis, about the impact of social media on public awareness. You think about how easy it is to share information on social media, as well as about how difficult it can be to discern more from less reliable information. As you brainstorm the effects of social media on public awareness in connection to political campaigns specifically, you realize you have enough to say about this topic without discussing two additional topics. You draft your thesis statement:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

Next you think about your argument’s parts and how they fit together. You read the Writing Center’s handout on organization . You decide that you’ll begin by addressing the counterargument that misinformation on social media has led to a less informed public. Addressing the counterargument point-by-point helps you articulate your evidence. You find it ends up taking more than one paragraph to discuss the strategies people use to compare and evaluate information as well as the evidence that people end up more informed as a result.

You notice that you now have four body paragraphs. You might have had three or two or seven; what’s important is that you allowed your argument to determine how many paragraphs would be needed and how they should fit together. Furthermore, your body paragraphs don’t each discuss separate topics, like “political campaigns” and “public health.” Instead they support different points in your argument. This is also a good moment to return to your introduction and revise it to focus more narrowly on introducing the argument presented in the body paragraphs in your paper.

Finally, after sketching your outline and writing your paper, you turn to writing a conclusion. From the Writing Center handout on conclusions , you learn that a “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it” conclusion doesn’t move your ideas forward. Applying the strategies you find in the handout, you may decide that you can use your conclusion to explain why the paper you’ve just written really matters.

Is it ever OK to write a five-paragraph essay?

Yes. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where somebody expects you to make sense of a large body of information on the spot and write a well-organized, persuasive essay—in fifty minutes or less? Sounds like an essay exam situation, right? When time is short and the pressure is on, falling back on the good old five-paragraph essay can save you time and give you confidence. A five-paragraph essay might also work as the framework for a short speech. Try not to fall into the trap, however, of creating a “listing” thesis statement when your instructor expects an argument; when planning your body paragraphs, think about three components of an argument, rather than three “points” to discuss. On the other hand, most professors recognize the constraints of writing blue-book essays, and a “listing” thesis is probably better than no thesis at all.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Blue, Tina. 2001. “AP English Blather.” Essay, I Say (blog), January 26, 2001. http://essayisay.homestead.com/blather.html .

Blue, Tina. 2001. “A Partial Defense of the Five-Paragraph Theme as a Model for Student Writing.” Essay, I Say (blog), January 13, 2001. http://essayisay.homestead.com/fiveparagraphs.html .

Denecker, Christine. 2013. “Transitioning Writers across the Composition Threshold: What We Can Learn from Dual Enrollment Partnerships.” Composition Studies 41 (1): 27-50.

Fanetti, Susan et al. 2010. “Closing the Gap between High School Writing Instruction and College Writing Expectations.” The English Journal 99 (4): 77-83.

Hillocks, George. 2002. The Testing Trap: How State Assessments Control Learning . New York and London: Teachers College Press.

Hjortshoj, Keith. 2009. The Transition to College Writing , 2nd ed. New York: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Shen, Andrea. 2000. “Study Looks at Role of Writing in Learning.” Harvard Gazette (blog). October 26, 2000. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2000/10/study-looks-at-role-of-writing-in-learning/ .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Academic writing: from paragraph to essay, dorothy zemach , lisa a. rumisek.

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First published September 30, 2002

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Baker College Writing Guide

• Paragraph Structure
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• Key Components of an Essay

Introduction to Paragraphs

Building the perfect body paragraph, transitions.

• Finding and Using Scholarly Research
• Using Bias-Free Language
• Writing Genres
• Sentence Structure
• Punctuation and Grammar
• Revision, Editing, and Proofreading

A paragraph is a group of sentences with a single focus.

• The topic sentence in the paragraph captures the central idea or focus of the paragraph.
• The remaining sentences provide support and elaboration.
• Within the paragraph there should be a unified focus.
• If you find that your are writing short two and three sentence paragraphs it may well be that you are not developing your ideas and providing your reader with enough information on the topic.
• In college writing assignments, paragraphs should be about 6 to 9 sentences. There should be no more than 3 paragraphs per page. If there are more, it likely means one or more paragraph is not adequately developed.
• Never begin or end a paragraph with a quotation from a source. Paragraphs should begin in the student writer's voice and end in it as well. 
• If your paragraphs are running exceptionally long then it may be that you have multiple topics in the paragraph and you should consider breaking the long paragraph up into multiple paragraphs.

The following links provide additional guidance as you think about your own paragraph development techniques. 

• Building the Perfect Body Paragraph This is a detailed guide for writing paragraphs.
• Topic Sentences This resource demonstrates how to create and use effective topic sentences in your paragraphs.
• Paragraphing (Length Consistency)

Transitions provide connections between paragraphs.

Overall, they will help create unity in your writing allowing the reader to better see the relationship between topics as developed in your individual paragraphs. 

• Writing Transitions
• Transition Words and Phrases This is a brief list of commonly used transitional phrases.
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