The Parts of a Paragraph

Original artwork by Melissa Reese Etheridge

The Main Idea
Paragraphs that stand alone almost always have a central idea. So do paragraphs that are part of a longer piece of writing. The central idea is the big idea in the paragraph. Teachers also call it the main idea. In the following paragraph, you will find the main idea in the first sentence. It tells you that this paragraph is about how Hopis use Kachina dolls.

Because Hopis have not written language, Kachina dolls are used to pass tribal lore and religion down through generations. Given to the young during special dances, Kachina dolls are then hung in the home as constant reminders of Hopi ancestry and heritage. Though too young to understand their meaning, infants are given Kachina paddle dolls as toys, so that from birth they are familiar with Hopi custom.

The Topic Sentence
Location of the Topic Sentence: The topic sentence states the main idea of the paragraph. You may find it at the beginning of the paragraph, in the middle, or even at the end. Then it's like a surprise ending. In the paragraph above, the topic sentence is the first sentence of the paragraph. In the paragraph below, the topic sentence is the last. This sentence makes clear that the villagers are preparing for a battle. The other sentences lead up to that point.

Quickly, quickly we gathered the sheep into the pens. Children rushed through the village gathering firewood to pile inside the homes. Men and women scooped up pots and pots of water, filling cisterns and containers as rapidly as possible. Peopled pulled the last ears of corn from the fields and turned their backs on the dry stalks. Finally, we all stood together in the plaza in the center of the village for just a moment before the fighters went to stand near the walls and the wide-eyed children were coazed inside the houses. And so we prepared for the coming battle.

Importance of the Topic Sentence: Paragraphs that relate a series of events or that tell a story often don't have a topic sentence. Read the following paragraph. It doesn't have a topic sentence. But all the sentences are about one main idea--a relationship between two women.

"Oh, Lottie, it's good to see you," Bess said, but saying nothing about Lottie's splendid appearnace. Upstairs Bess, putting down her shabby suitcase, said, "I'll sleep like a rock tonight," without a word of praise for her lovely room. At the lavish table, top-heavey with turkey, Bess said, "I'll take light and dark both," with no marveling at the size of the bird, or that there was turkey for two elderly women, on of them too poor to buy her own bread. ~Dorothy West, "The Richer, the Poorer"

Although all paragraphs don't have to have topic sentences, it is helpful to use them when you are writing. They may help you focus on your main idea. They also assist the reader find the main idea.

Writing Note: In a longer piece of writing, start a new paragraph when you change ideas. Also, if you are writing dialogue (the actual words of people), start a new paragraph when you change speakers.

Supporting Sentences
Supporting sentences give details that explain or prove the main idea. These sentences are called supporting sentences because they contain sensory details, facts, or examples that support the main idea of the paragraph.

Sensory details are words that describe one of the five senses--sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Facts give information that can be proved true in a concrete way. For instance, it's a fact that seagulls drop clams on rocks to break them open. It's also a fact that great herds of buffalo once roamed the western plains. Examples give typical instances of an idea. A manatee is an example of a mammal that lives in the water. A chameleon is a lizard whose changes in coloring are an example of protective coloration. The following shows the kinds of details you can use to support the main idea of the paragraph:

Sight: The bright sun glared off the front windshield of the car.
Sound: Thunder boomed down the canyon, echoing off the walls.
Touch: My hands felt frozen to the cold, steel handlebars.
Taste: Thirstily, she gulped down the sweet orange juice.
Smell: The sharp, unpleasant odor of fresh asphalt met his nose.
Facts: In 1961, Roger Maris slammed sixty-one home runs to break the old record of sixty held by Babe Ruth.
Examples: Fierce windstorms occur throughout the world. In the central United States, tornadoes have wind speeds over two hundred miles per hour.

Unity and Coherence
A paragraph is a little like a car. It has to have unity--you don't want one blue fender on a red car. And it has to have coherence--the back of the car has to be connected to the front.

Unity
A paragraph has unity when all the sentences support or tell something about, one main idea. A paragraph that doesn't have unity may confuse your readers. For example, in a paragraph about Bonnie St. John, you might tell how she became a skiing champion despite losing a leg. But if you mentioned a friend who is also a skier, you would destroy the unity. That information wouldn't be related to your main idea.

In the following paragraph, the first sentence states the main idea. Notice how all the other sentences tell something more about the heavy snow.

The snow began quietly this time, like an afterthought to the gray Sunday nigth. The moon almost broke through once, but toward daylight, a little wind came up and started white curls, thin and lonesome, running over the old drifts left from the New Year storm. Gradually the snow thickened, until around eight-thirty the two ruts of the winding trails were covered and undisturbed, except down in the Lone Tree district, where an old, yellow bus crawled heavily along, feeling out the ruts between the choppy sand hills. ~Mari Sandooz, Winter Thunder

Coherence
A paragraph has coherence when readers can tell how and why ideas are connected.

To create coherence, you can do two things. First, you can arrange your details in an order that makes sense to the reader.

The second way of creating coherence in paragraphs it to use transitional words or phrases to connect ideas. These are words and phrases like, for example, mainly, and also. They not only connect ideas but also tell why and how they're related.

The following chart shows examples of some of the common words and phrases used for transitions that help to create coherence.

This infographic was created by Melissa Reese Etheridge.

The following paragraph tells how Native Americans are recognized everywhere. The writer uses transitional words to show how ideas are connected. Notice, for example, how the writer says that at first kids pretend they don't see him. Then, they turn and look.

When I go someplace, most of the time those little people see me. At first they'll pretend not to see me. They go past me a little ways, and then they will turn back and look at me. Then, they'll nudge their mama or daddy or grandma or grandpa, and I'll hear them say, "There's an Indian back there." So, the Indians are still here. We never phased away. We didn't just blend into society and vanish. In fact, we're appearing more and more and more. We get around more now, too. Indians are not just confined only to the United States or one state or one country or one city or one house. They know us all over this Earth. ~Wallace H. Black Elk and William S. Lyon, Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of the Lakota

Ways of Developing Paragraphs
What you're writing about, your subject or topic, usually determines the way you develop it. Here are four ways of writing a paragraph:

Description: Looking at parts of a person, place, or thing
Narration: Looking at changes in a person, place, or thing over time
Comparison and Contrast: Finding likenesses and differences between people, places, or things
Evaluation: Judging the person, place, or thing's value or worth

Description
How would you describe your favorite hangout to one of your friends? What does the Ninja Turtle Michelangelo look like?

In answering either of these questions, you're describing something. That means you're picking out specific details, or features, to tell about that will help someone else recognize it.

In describing something, you often use spatial order. Spatial order organizes details according to their location. In the following paragraph, notice how the writer uses sensory details and spatial order to describe her father's farm.

The farm my father grew up on, where Granpa Welty and Grandma lived, was in southern Ohio in the rolling hills of Hocking County, near the small town of Logan. it was one of the neat, narrow-porched, two-story farmhouses, painted white, of the Pennsylvania-German country. Across its front grew feathery cosmos and barrel-sized peony bushes with stripy heavy-scented blooms pushing out of the leaves. There was a springhouse to one side, down a little walk only one brick in width, and an old apple orchard in front, the barn and the pasture and fields of corn and wheat behind. Periodically there came sounds from the barn, and you could hear the crows, but everything else was still. ~Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

Narration
What happened when a character lost in the frigid arctic wilderness couldn't build a fire? How is soccer played? What caused the ocean liner Titanic to sink?

When you answer any of these questions, you are narrating. That means you are telling about an event or an action as it changes over time. Because narrating tells about changes in time, you usually use chronological, or time, order.

You can use narration to tell a story (what happened to the character in the Arctic), to explain a process (how to play soccer), or to explain causes and effects (what caused the Titanic to sink).

Telling a Story
Everybody loves a good story. You've probably listened to one or told one today. It may have been made up, or it may have been about something that happened.

The following is a story slaves told many years ago about some strange escapes from slavery.

Uncle Mingo's forehead wrinkled like a mask in the moonlight. "Don't make light of what old folks tell you, son," he warned. "If the old folks say they seen slaves pick up and fly back to Africa, like birds, just don't you dispute them. If they tell you aoubt a slave preacher what led his whole flock to the beach and sat down on the sand with them, looking across the ocean toward home, don't ask no questions. Next morning nobody could find trace of that preacher or his people. And no boat had been there neither. One day, when was chopping cotton in the field, i looked up the old fellow working in the row next to mine was gone. he was too feeble to run away, and I couldn't see no place for him to hide. None fo the others in the field saw him leave either, but later on an old woman drinking water at a well, told us she noticed something pass in front of the sun aobut that tiem, like a hawk or a buzzard maybe, but she didn't pay it much mind. ~Arna Bontemps, Chariot In the Sky: A Story fo the Jubilee Singers

Explaining a process
When you tell how to do something or how something works, you're explaining a process. Often, this means telling how to do something step by step--what is done first, then next, and so on. This is chronological order.

The following paragraph tells how kites may have been developed.

Like a lot of very old activities, no one is quite sure how kite flying started. Perhaps an ancient Chinese first noticed big leaves of certain plants fluttering at the end of long vines. Then, after watching "leafkites" for a while, he tied his straw hat to a string just for fun and happily found that the wind kept it flying. Later, he may have stretched a piece of animal skin over a bamboo frame and flown that from the end of a line. ~Dan Carlinsky, "Kites" 

Explaining Cause and Effect
Narrating is also used to explain causes and effects. In other words, narrating can be used to tell how one event is a result of an earlier event. The following paragraph tells what causes crickets to stop chirping. It also tells one helpful effect of their sudden silence.

As you walk along the sidewalk, the tree crickets keep up their song until you are quite close; then they stop. They can sense your presence and fall silent. If, as sometimes happens in Blantyre, there is a leopard prowling around among the trash cans a few blocks away, then the tree crickets near ot it will stop singing, and you will be warned of its presence in time to turn back. So, singing insects are excellent watchdogs. ~Carson I. A. Ritchie, Insects, the Creeping conquerors and Human History 

Comparison and Contrast
A car manufacturer may want to know how its car compares to a competitor's car. The manufacturer will want to analyze the similarities and differences. Whenever you compare, you tell how things are alike. Whenever yo contrast, you tell how things are different from one another. Students, as well as professionals, are asked to make such comparisons.

When you compare and contrast, yu can use logical order. Something that is logical is something that makes sense. When you compare and contrast, it is logical to group related ideas together. Read the following paragraph. The writer compares and contrasts her two sisters. How are the sisters alike? How are they different?

My sisters may be twins, but they are very different. Sara and Sally look exactly alike. They both have long, braided black hair and big black eyes with eyelashes otu to there. But the resemblance stops with looks. If they just stand still, they can pretend to be each other. if they talk or move, the joke is over. Sara talks all the time and bounces just like Winnie the Pooh's friend Tigger. Sally never says anything except "Pass the peanut butter," and she moves like a sick snail. How can they be twins?

Evaluation
Do you like broccoli? Did you enjoy the most recent short story that you read? Whenever you answer questions like these, you're evaluating. In other words, you're telling whether yo think broccoli and the short story are good or bad. You'd want to give reasons for your answer. For example, you might say you gagged on cooked broccoli, but you love raw broccoli with cheese dip. You might say you enjoyed the short story because you identified with the main character.

When writing an evaluation, you will probably organize it by order of importance. For example, you might place the most important information first. Then you'd put your next most important information, and so on. Or, you might arrange your most important information last so that you gradually lead up to your biggest point.

The following paragraph was written to persuade people not to build more buildings in Yellowstone National Park. Notice the reasons the writer gives for the evaluation.

I don't think that more hotels, campgrounds, and restaurants should be built inYellowstone National park. The park is set aside to protect the animals and plants that live there and to allow people to experience the wilderness. When more buildings go up, more people crowd into the park. And the more people there are, the les room there is for wildlfe and for wilderness. People don't just take up space. They also scare the animals and keep them from living as they would naturally live in the wild. In Yellowstone National Park, I think the most improtant thing is to protect the animals and the natural wilderness. if this means putting a stop to more building, then the building should be stoppped.