Module 1 — Effective
writing: Strategies
and principles
| Course Guide | Module 1 | Module 2a | Module 2b |
Paragraph and document flow
Now that you have considered good practice for developing sentences, let’s move to the next level of organization: the paragraph.
Paragraphs help both readers and writers. They give readers a framework to use to make sense of the ideas you are trying to communicate. They give you as the writer a means of systematically developing the main ideas you want to get across. Paragraphs also give you a way to connect that idea to the other ideas you are presenting. Each paragraph should develop a specific idea that supports your statement of purpose.
There is no ideal length for a paragraph. Paragraphs are effective because they work to support an idea, not because they have a particular number of words or sentences.
Good paragraphs use three important techniques to guide the reader:
- A good paragraph has a topic sentence that presents the main idea of the paragraph.
- The topic sentence contains a controlling idea. The other sentences in the paragraph work together to support this controlling idea.
- An effective paragraph follows a pattern of organization that is easily recognizable. There are many patterns available to writers. We will be looking at a few of them in the following pages.
In the next few sections, you’ll work through examples of good and bad paragraphs from ILO documents. By the time you finish, you’ll have a good understanding of all these new terms!