How to Build a Paragraph

Writing looks like a light work. Even, people say that writing is easy. This saying may be more just like a stimulant that encourages people writing, but a good writing is not as easy as to say it. Good writing requires adequate technical knowledge, logical idea managing, and language proficiency. Communication competency will not be apart from writing. How to make a good writing?

Writing is actually communicating information or message in the forms of written language. To communicate the information, writers have to follow certain techniques so that their readers will easily understand. With their writings, the writers would make readers know and take any advantage from or, further to this-in some cases, to influence their thinking.

As writing is the art of influencing people by means of the power of words, writing is not just a matter of having a brilliant idea. How to present the idea will give much effect to the transferring process of the idea to readers. This communication of idea will be much influenced by whom the readers are supposed to be, the intent of writing, and how deep the expected effect to them.

Writers will express their idea in the form of sentences, but bad structure of them will not help readers comprehend the idea easily. Even, it may lead them to misunderstanding and misinterpreting and it means that the writer fails to transfer his mission. That is why it is important to organize such a group of sentences into a basic unit of writing that develops the main idea. This basic unit of organization is called as a paragraph.

By means of paragraph, writers will manifest their ideas. And only when they are developed in such a way, readers will ‘catch’ these ideas. To write a good paragraph the understanding of what it is about, components of its unity, and how it make a sense seems to be a compulsory.

A paragraph is a cluster of inter-linked sentences, built as a basic unit of a writing that will compose the whole writing in its unity. The numbers of sentences vary from one to another, but it will comprise the three main points of topic sentence, supporting sentences and concluding sentence. In addition to these three points, unity and coherence will support the paragraph to be powerful.

A topic sentence is stating the main idea of the paragraph. It comprises the thing that is to be described. A topic sentence should be precise and no need to tell everything about the topic in the first sentence. It serves to limit to one area that will be described in the space of the paragraph.

Supporting sentences are inter-linked sentences that develop the topic. They explain the topic by giving outlines, reasons, facts that will support the topic to be clear to understand. These sentences will make up the body of the paragraph as the result of describing the topic.

Closing sentence is the concluding sentence that sums up important points from the discussion. It may be a sentence of reinforcing the topic in another words. It is the conclusion of the discussion in the paragraph.

In addition to the three main points that form a paragraph, unity and coherence will support a good paragraph. Unity means that in the paragraph only one and the main idea is stated in the topic sentence and is developed by the supporting sentences to make it easy to comprehend. Meanwhile, coherence means how supporting sentences are describing the topic in logical and consecutive order.

The three steps of building a paragraph are pre-writing, writing and editing. Pre-writing is the step when writers think carefully and organize their ideas for the paragraph before they start writing. The writing step is when they turn the ideas into sentences and communicate them. The editing step is when they check the paragraph for mistakes and take necessary corrections.

In pre-writing step, it may be useful to think of:
Why do I choose the topic?
Why is the topic important?
How can I make the topic interesting?
How to collect data related to the topic?
Then, organize the facts ad ideas to develop the topic and the best way to present them to readers.

Writing step is when writers put on the idea and facts to the consecutive of order of supporting sentences.It is the phase when they write down the topic sentence, describing it with supporting sentence and sum up main point into the conclusing sentence, without missing unity and coherence.

Editing step is when writers check the paragraph for necessary corrections against mistakes. Not only checking against spelling and gramatilcal errors, but to the extend of this, if they have developed the paragraph excellent.

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