Constructing effective paragraphs

Abstract

You may find it difficult to answer this question and may be forgiven for thinking that paragraphs are just chunks of prose which are used purely to break up a page of solid print by indenting every so often in a fairly arbitrary way. But paragraphs, like sentences, form the building blocks by which we construct a well-organized piece of writing out of a jumbled assortment of ideas. The construction process is at three levels: the sentence, the paragraph and the composition as a whole. Any writer in setting out to write a letter, a report, an essay or even a book must have an overall purpose — a main idea. (In a longer piece of work he may divide his material into sections or chapters, each of which should also have a main idea.) This main idea is then divided into sub-ideas. It is these sub-ideas which form the basis of each paragraph.