Paragraph Development

Writing something good, whether it's an essay, a research paper, or even just a blog, can take up so much time and effort. Often deemed as a laborious work, it is because writers do not know how to start writing a paper, or how to organize and write their thoughts down cohesively and coherently. And such, confused writers cause readers to get confused too, and the essay failed to serve its original purpose. To give a little insight on how to improve one’s writing skill, this essay will focus on 2 main questions: “How do I start writing?” and “What to write in each paragraph?”

How do I Start Writing?

This is an important question that you should ask yourself when you are in the brainstorming stage. This is a stage where you start thinking about the purpose of your writing, its structure, and the information you want to tell the readers about. Pick a side that you want to argue for, and give at least 3 reasons or explanations to support your argument.

After you are done with the essay planning, the thing to think about is the thesis statement. Thesis statement is the main idea of the essay, and is the most important part of an essay. It contains information about the limited subject of an essay which tells the reader a specific issue or idea the essay will be talking about, the precise position of the essay where you inform the readers your view on the essay’s question or topic, and the map of the essay where you explain your views or opinions. When formalizing a thesis statement, remember to not write a highly opinionated statement and write something too factual as it will be harder for you to develop your ideas when writing the paper.

What to Write in Each paragraph?

Now that you have a fairly clear picture of what to write, start constructing your paragraphs. The first paragraph will always be the introductory paragraph, where you introduce to the readers what the essay is going to be about. This is where the thesis statement is usually found. The very last paragraph is where you conclude all the points discussed in the previous paragraphs. In some cases, writers can also provide some solutions if there are any problems mentioned in the essay. The paragraphs in between the introduction and conclusion are called the body of the essay, the meat of the burger.

To write a good essay body, you can first ask yourself the 5W’s and 1H question (who, what, where, when, why, and how) to know the information that you should be using to answer your topic. In each of the paragraphs, there must be a topic sentence, usually at the beginning, that gives readers an idea of the focus of the paragraphs. You then expand the topic sentence in the subsequent sentences by providing examples, explanation, and even evidence to support your claim. Ask yourself: “Is this thing important enough for me to write it in? Does it answer the question asked? How is this evidence related to my topic?” It is important that you give clear reasoning so that readers will be able to fully understand the relationship of your topic and the explanations, and not make random guesses.

Aside from asking yourself questions to make sure that you answered most of a reader’s possible questions, it is also good if you can create analogies. When writing an argument, comparing it to a similar thing that everyone can relate to can also help strengthen your point or argument. Creating analogies can allow readers to understand something complex more easily. This way, even non-experts will be able to understand a complicated knowledge, and will be interested to find out more and continue reading what you wrote.

If possible, write a sentence of a small summary to clarify to readers what the paragraph is about. Make sure you don't leave your readers hanging by leaving some questions unanswered, and remind the reader of the relevance of the information in this paragraph to the main or controlling idea of the paper.

Last Steps

A crucial thing to do when you finished writing a paper is to re-read the whole paper again, aloud if you can. This allows you to see the overall cohesiveness of your paper, and let you hear whether or not what you write makes any sense. Reading aloud can also allow you to detect small silly mistakes, such as rewriting the same word or sentence twice. Come back to your paper a few days after you've written it to see if everything seems complete and ready to be submitted already.

Written by Alice Pricillya