WRITING COURSE 3: WRITING PARAGRAPHS We have said that good writing is made up of good sentences. Going a step further, we can also say that a good text consists of good sentences that work together well. Of course, there are no “rules” about how to make them do this. But there are a limited number of tools available for turning a string of sentences into a text. One of them is layout.
What is a paragraph? We can often see what sort of a text we are dealing with without actually reading it. If you leaf through a newspaper, for example, you will usually be able to see at a glance the difference between news reports, feature articles, editorial comment and advertisements. Each of these genres has its own characteristic layout, involving use (or non-use) of pictures, headlines and sub-headings, and the way the writing is divided up. This last element is useful in all forms of writing. Even in ancient times writers felt it necessary to write a short pen stroke in the margin to signal where the breaks in a text were. This stroke was called a “paragraphos”. Today, we mark a paragraph by starting on a new line (usually with an indentation
[innrykk]), or by leaving a blank line. Paragraphs are used very differently in different texts. In a tabloid newspaper report, for example, paragraphs are usually very short, sometimes no more than one sentence. The aim is to be brief, to focus on the essentials and to keep the reader’s attention. When you are telling a story, whether it’s a fairy story, a joke or a novel, the paragraphs will have to be placed in a way that supports the development of the narrative. New events or changes of setting will require new paragraphs. In the following we are going to concentrate on the use of paragraphs in texts like essays, articles and reports – the sort of texts you often have to write in your English course, and, indeed, in all your studies both at upper secondary school and afterwards. In such texts, paragraphs are vital. They tell the reader how a text is structured, what hangs together with what. Reading a text without paragraphs is hard work; it is difficult to know where one idea finishes and another starts. Reading a text with too many paragraphs (i.e. too many empty or half-empty lines) is no better; it just seems a mess.
Topic sentence The golden rule of paragraph writing in essays is that each paragraph should contain only one main idea. Very often this main idea is formulated in one of the sentences in the paragraph. We call this the topic sentence. Usually, but not always, it is the first one. The other sentences in the paragraph are subordinate (underordnet/underordna) to the topic sentence. Here is an example:
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A MEETING OF WORLDS