Posts Tagged ‘paragraph’
Far too many students have very little idea quite where they are heading in any paragraph of an essay, but the fact is that every paragraph can and should be tightly, and even self-consciously, organized. Just as an essay as a whole sets up an issue, deviances, and arrives somewhere, so each paragraph of an essay needs to locate itself, advance, and arrive somewhere new.
If you look back at the opening paragraph of a Thackeray essay in the last section you should be able to see that it conforms to this pattern. It actually consists of three sentences which fu... Read more...
Tags: Essay Writing, paragraph, paragraphs, sentences, topic sentence
Posted in Essay Writing |
Can you see anything wrong with this paragraph?
The risk of damnation is made clear in Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy” by the use of a ghost from hell, called Revenge, who acts as a chorus to the play. This provides a formal framework which contrasts with the violent actions of the characters. There’s also something rather spooky about a ghost.
If you feel that the last sentence struck the wrong note, it is because the word ‘spooky’ is inappropriate. But why? Isn’t it a perfectly good word? It probably is, but the problem is that it’s an informal word, the kind of word that might be used in conversation, but which jars with the formal tone required in an essay. You might also feel that it is a rather lightweight word. Up until that point the writer has achieved a good level of analysis, but the final sentence unintentionally trivializes the subject For a moment the writer takes his/her eye off the topic and makes a rather vague, colloquial point. It is important in writing an essay to strive for a fairly formal tone. Contractions such as didn’t, wasn... Read more...
Tags: dictionary, Essay Writing, paragraph, phrase search, phrases, subordinate clauses, thesaurus, writing an essay
Posted in Essay Writing, Writing |
It is useful to think of the first sentence of a paragraph as the ‘topic’ sentence. In our revised version of the letter, the topic sentence is: David was not able to attend school yesterday. It is effective as an opening because it is such a controlled, almost declamatory, statement. Most essays can start in a similar way: you can create an initial dramatic and arresting effect by having a simple sentence that stands alone, not tangled up in subordinate clauses and details. Look, for example, at these opening sentences from students’ essays:
Modern poetry is disturbing and problematic.
Modem poetry, by which we mean poetry produced roughly between 1910 and 1930, falls into various categories, of which the most original is probably that referred to as ‘modernist’, in particular T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.
There is nothing actually wrong with the second example here, but it does not create any great expectation that we are going to encounter an interesting essay. Rather, it is going to be an essay loaded with facts, crowded in at every comma. The first example, by contra... Read more...
Tags: great expectation, oxford english dictionary, paragraph, punctuation, sentences, simple sentence, students essays, subordinate clauses, topic sentence, Write Topic Sentences
Posted in Writing |
Our message, it should be apparent, is simple: the way to move forward is to go back to basics. If you want to excel as a writer, there are no fancy or elaborate tricks that have to be learnt. You merely have to become more proficient in exercising the basic skills of sentence construction. In order to drive home the points about how sentences are composed, and how important it is to be in charge of the mechanics of sentence construction and the mechanics of punctuation, we are going to examine a single essay by a Student about the founding of the city of Philadelphia. At this point, you might be tempted to say that such a subject has nothing in common with the essays you have to write, but try to see that what we are discussing the whole time is how to solve problems in writing, and how solving them rates the opportunity to say more in an essay.
Here is the opening paragraph of the essay exactly as the student wrote it:
The creation of the c... Read more...
Tags: american colonies, homework, mechanics of sentence construction, paragraph, punctuation, sentences
Posted in English Basics, Writing |
1. Setting off the introductory element of a sentence
[caption id="attachment_9" align="alignleft" width="246" caption="Two Main Uses of Comma in English Writing "]
[/caption]
Another instance in which the comma is necessary is where it is used to set off the introductory elements of a sentence. We can illustrate this by considering that last sentence. The subject of the sentence is another instance in which the comma is necessary. We could have started the paragraph, however, with an introductory clause:
If we move on to the second use of the comma, we can consider another instance in which the comma is necessary to set off the introductory element of a sentence.
In this example, the introductory element is just a way of establishing a link ease the reader into the main points being made. The same thinking is in evidence when we use tiny verb... Read more...
Tags: elements of a sentence, English Basics, introductory clause, introductory element, introductory elements, introductory phrases, paragraph, prepositional phrase, prepositional words, uses of comma
Posted in Featured, Writing |
