Articles Index

Practice in Making a Simple Outline for a Cause & Effect Paragraph
Here we'll practice making a simple outline: a list of the key points in a paragraph or essay. This basic outline can help us revise a composition by showing at a glance if we need to add, remove, change, or rearrange any supporting details.

Sample Example Paragraph: Junk Food Junkie
This paragraph is effectively developed with specific examples. "Junk Food Junkie" is also a well-organized paragraph, but it lacks a satisfactory concluding sentence.

Example Paragraph: Confessions of a Slob
The following paragraph is effectively developed with specific examples. "Confessions of a Slob" is also well organized, but it lacks a satisfactory concluding sentence.

Practice in Composing Topic Sentences
This exercise will give you practice in expressing a main idea in a topic sentence that attracts the interest of your readers.

Revision Checklist for a Descriptive Paragraph
Once you have completed a draft of your descriptive paragraph, you can use the following checklist to guide your revision.

Model Descriptive Paragraphs
These four paragraphs--three by students, one by a professional writer--respond to the guidelines in the project "How to Write a Descriptive Paragraph."

Practice in Organizing a Descriptive Paragraph
This exercise will give you practice in organizing a descriptive paragraph.

Practice in Supporting a Topic Sentence with Specific Details
A topic sentence contains the main idea upon which a paragraph is developed. What follows a topic sentence are a number of supporting sentences that develop the main idea with specific details. This exercise offers practice in selecting appropriate supporting details in a descriptive paragraph.

Coherence Strategies: Transitional Words and Phrases
Transitional words and phrases show the direction of our thought as we move from one sentence to the next. Here you'll find a list of the common transitional words and phrases, grouped according to the type of relationship shown by each.

Draft a Descriptive Paragraph
Once you have settled on a topic for your descriptive paragraph and collected some details, you're ready to assemble those details in a rough draft. Here's a basic model you can follow when organizing a descriptive paragraph.

How to Write a Descriptive Paragraph
In this project, you will begin by selecting one of your belongings and then drafting a list of details that describe it. Next, you will put these details into sentences and organize the sentences into a paragraph. Finally, you will revise the paragraph to make sure that it is unified and clearly organized.

Model Place Descriptions: Four Descriptive Paragraphs
These four descriptive paragraphs respond to the guidelines in the project "How to Write a Place Description." As you read each paragraph, notice how place signals help to promote coherence, guiding the reader clearly from one detail to the next.

Composing a Character Sketch
This descriptive paragraph--a student's sketch of his school principal--served as the model for the exercise "Sentence Combining With Basic Modifiers."

Writing a Narrative Paragraph: Freewriting and Drafting
By showing how one student turned an exercise in freewriting into a coherent draft, this article will help you compose your own narrative paragraph.

Paragraph Unity
Unity is the quality of sticking to one idea from start to finish, with every sentence in a paragraph contributing to the central purpose and main idea of that paragraph.

Coherence Strategies: Repetition of Key Words & Structures
Repeating key words is a valuable technique for achieving coherence in paragraphs. Used skillfully and selectively, this technique can help to hold sentences together and focus the reader's attention on a central idea.

Coherence Exercise: Building & Connecting Sentences
This sentence-building exercise offers practice in applying the principles introduced in Coherence Strategies: Transitional Words and Phrases.

Coherence Strategies: Revising Paragraphs with Transitional Words and Phrases
These two revision exercises provide opportunities to apply the techniques introduced in Coherence Strategies: Transitional Words and Phrases.

Practice in Revising a Place Description
In this exercise, we consider ways of revising a paragraph that was drafted in response to the guidelines in "How to Write a Place Description."