It’s important here to clarify what’s meant by a paragraph. Not that you haven’t met them before, but that’s often part of the problem – different kinds of writing have different kinds of paragraphs, and if you bring in the wrong kind from some other kind of writing, they don’t work well for academic writing. The model a lot of people follow is newspaper paragraphs, but they’re quite different, because they expect a different kind of reader – one who wants to get through the article rapidly, and may not read further than the first paragraph. So newspaper paragraphs are often just one sentence long, to give you the illusion that you’re belting through the thing, and also they’re very repetitive. An article will condense all the main information into the opening paragraph, and then it will keep coming back again and again to the same stuff – so if you only read the beginning, you don’t really miss much.  

In an essay, you can expect your reader to read the whole thing, and they expect you to deal with each idea once, in one place, and develop it fully there. And the most helpful way of structuring each paragraph, for your reader, is to put the main point in the first sentence – the “topic sentence”, as it’s called – and then explain it and give the evidence for it in the rest of the paragraph.  

I’ll show you an example from English, where a student was writing about Shakespeare’s play Othello, looking at the ways that Othello’s supposed friend Iago starts trying to drive him mad by making him suspicious of his wife, Desdemona. What we’re asking is, does the first sentence make the point of this paragraph, and does the whole rest of the paragraph show us the evidence that point is based on? 

Nowhere in this passage does Iago state categorically that Desdemona is untrue to Othello, but merely hints at the idea through repeated references to jealousy and people who have been cheated, wronged and ‘cuckolded”. He tells Othello that “that cuckold loves in bliss who certain of his fate loves not his wronger” and “he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed”. Iago also warns Othello to avoid jealousy at all costs: “O beware, my lord, of Jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on”, and he describes vividly the fate of those who have had their lives marred by envy. Iago further compounds Othello’s anxiety by refusing to tell him exactly what he means by the images and proverbs that figure so highly in his speech. 

This paragraph is indeed focused throughout on one idea, which was in the topic sentence. If we had to put that idea into just a few words, what might they be? 

“Indirectness of Iago’s insinuations” 

– and we can write that next to the paragraph, so we can see just by a glance in the margin what that paragraph is dealing with. 

That’s the ideal – a paragraph is an idea, the whole idea, and nothing but the idea – then what could be hard about that? Well, in a sense, your whole essay is one idea, so your problem is in breaking it down, what are its pieces, and where does each one begin and end? To illustrate the problem,  here is an example from an Art History essay, where the student couldn’t make up her mind whether she was writing one paragraph or more, because she had several kinds of things to say, about one topic. She’s indicated some sort of chunking by finishing, in places, in the middle of the line, but she hasn’t created proper paragraphs by indenting the line after. She was reluctant to divide this material into paragraphs, because it all dealt with one “idea”: the influence of photography on Manet’s painting. On what basis, then, was she offering the tentative divisions seen here? Can you see reasons for “chunking” in this way?  The imagery of modern photographs was of great influence on Manet’s perception, for it raised questions regarding the illusion of space: was the photograph capturing the true nature of space and reality or was it falsifying it due to some mechanical distortion?Manet believed that the eye does not perceive the transitional half tones but only the harsher contrasts; in his work he therefore eliminated the transitional tones and made use of bright and dazzling light effects created by juxtaposing the near-white areas to the near-black. The elimination of surface detail and the simple modelling of figures thus rendered creates an effect of flatness that is paralleled in photography.Instead of rounding off angles of a body and modifying the awkward proportions, as other artists had done in order to achieve a more natural and pleasing form, Manet incorporated these into his work. He depicted these traits of human anatomy just as photography did, and hence in

The writer is dealing, here, with three different aspects of the influence of photography on Manet’s work. Her first section introduces this whole discussion; the second focuses on the contrast of shades in Manet’s paintings; the third part looks at the treatment of anatomy; and the last part looks at the cropped spaces Manet painted. (So, next to each part, in the margin, you could label them: “influence of photography”; “contrast of shades”; “treatment of anatomy”; “cropped spaces”.) Each of these aspects could have been given its own paragraph, especially if each one were developed a little further, perhaps with an example from the painter’s works. In putting them together, the writer produces a very long paragraph, which doesn’t draw attention to each aspect in the way that separate paragraphs would do. On the other hand, she had many other points to make, that didn’t concern photography, and in putting all the material about it into one paragraph she showed that it related more closely to that topic than to the others she covered in the same essay. So paragraphing can involve decisions which are not obvious. It’s probably safe to say that one “idea” may be an aspect of a larger idea, but could get its own paragraph if it differs from other aspects in some recognizable way. 

Trying to label each paragraph with what it’s doing  is a very important technique for bringing your first draft under control and turning it into something your reader can deal with. If you were shown only one drafting technique, this would be the one, (this comes from a book called Essay Writing for Students, by John Clanchy and Brigid Ballard). By labeling each of your paragraphs in the margin with what it’s about, or what point it’s making, you achieve several things:  

• First. You produce an outline of your whole draft that you can see without getting bogged down in rereading all your wording again and again.
• Second. You can see if you’ve dealt with some point in two or three different places in your draft, bring that material together, and weed out the overlaps.  This is important because if you know ahead of time that you’re going to be able to do this, you can feel free in your first draft to keep coming back to ideas, add things as they occur to you, and don’t worry about getting the order right until you’re ready to redraft. Then you see, yes, I’ve brought this up here, I’ve come back to it on page 3, I had another idea about it on page 6, get out the scissors and bring this stuff together. Did I repeat myself? Cut it out and chuck it away.
• Third. You can see if there are any paragraphs that don’t make a point, and consider whether they’re doing anything useful in the essay. If they are, you’ve got to figure out what, and make a topic sentence that expresses that; and it’s always worth asking yourself, because most of the stuff you put in a draft IS there for a reason, but you may not have put it into words, because you think the material speaks for itself and it should just be obvious to your reader what point you’re making – but often it isn’t, so spell it out. But if you can’t, and some paragraphs really don’t work, you’ve got to pull them out and put them in a cardboard box under your bed until you can bear to actually throw them away.

Here is an example where it’s not clear which of these solutions would be right, but something’s got to be done because the paragraph as it is doesn’t have a focus. This one comes from an English essay about The Great Gatsby: 

The differences between the conversations at the two parties lie in the topics that are discussed. At Myrtle’s party, people talk about the other people present, whereas at Gatsby’s party they talk about food. In both instances Nick is involved, not on his own initiative, but at the request of others. He waits for the parties to begin, as he waits for other people to make him feel accepted. 

• Fourth. You can see if any paragraphs deal with more than one thing, and if so, you can separate them into two paragraphs and make a topic sentence for each. And that might have been the solution to the paragraph above, as well, if each idea was worth pursuing, for the purposes of that essay.
• Fifth. You can see whether the material flows in some logical order, and if it doesn’t, cut it up and spread it around the floor in different sequences until it you find an order that makes sense. It’s important, when you’re between drafts, to have a paper copy printed out to work with like this, because you can cut and paste very literally here, with real scissors and real sticky tape. For that you need paper, and write only on one side, because otherwise you can’t cut it up and move it around without mucking up what’s on the other side. And you need to leave a wide margin, for your labels, and it’s a good idea to double space – skip every second line—because you may want to add little things as you read it over, and you can fit those in above the line. Once you’re happy with the paper version, you can go back to the computer and save your first draft under another name, so you’ve still got the original to fall back on if you change your mind, but now you’ve got a second one where you can make the changes to match what you’ve accomplished on the floor.
• Finally, you can see whether you’ve shown the connections between your points, and if not, do that now. This is a kind of signposting, too, in that it’s for your reader’s benefit. You don’t need it, assuming that you know why you’ve put one thing after another, but it may not be clear to your reader how those ideas are related; they haven’t had the benefit of your train of thought, so for your final draft, it’s important to make those connections explicit. This may be just a matter of a connecting word or phrase– something like “however, therefore, by contrast, in view of this, for example” – don’t just throw these in at random, it’s got to be the word that actually expresses the connection that’s there, or else it’ll look worse than not using a connective at all. But if there is such a relationship, then this kind of language can make it clear. Sometimes it needs a whole sentence, and in a long and complex essay it can take a short paragraph to make the transition between one part and the next.

Summing up: Aspects of argument 

Here is a diagram that sets out two kinds of things that are meant when people talk about how well argued an essay is. They have in mind both the content, and the structure. Of course, there’s one more aspect of “how well” something is written, and that’s the area of expression, your control of the kind of language you need for academic writing. You can look back at the Academic Language and Learning home page and go to “Writing Better Essays : Expression: Getting it Right” ……………………….                                     

How well is this argued? – means :