Writing Skills 1
Revision of Paragraphing
Writing Skills 2
• Paragraphing is the key to writing good essays.
• For that reason we will start with the revision of paragraphing, namely paragraphing
principles.
Writing Skills 2
• Principle of FOCUS: A paragraph must FOCUS on a manageable aspect of a topic. A
paragraph is 4 to 8 or 10 sentences. Therefore, you cannot write about everything that
pertain to a certain topic in a paragraph. You should keep your focus as tight as possible so that you end up with a certain aspect of a
topic that can written about in at most 8 to 10 sentences.
Writing Skills 2
Sports is a good topic to write about but it a very general topic; you should narrow it down to a
specific sport. Writing about basketball is one step of narrowing it. Then what about basketball do you want to write about? Famous basketball players, contribution of basketball to national economy,
basketball injuries, basketball scholarships, correct age for children to start basketball, female
basketball players league, basketball and steroids?
Writing Skills 2
• Focusing enables you to break an essay into parts as well as providing you with the skill of analysis. Analytical thinking is breaking an
issue or a phenomena into its constituents and it is indispensable to the skill of writing essays.
Writing Skills 2
• The focus of a paragraph is announced or
revealed in the topic sentence. Topic sentence shows the reader whether your focus is tight enough or not.
• To provide your topic sentence with a narrow enough focus, you must use one or more key words that will enable the developement of the idea.
Writing Skills 2
• Therefore, a topic sentence might be too specific in which case there is no room for development. Or it might be too general in
which case the topic cannot be covered in 8 to 10 sentences.
• Consider what might you write in a paragraph with the following topic sentences:
Writing Skills 2
• I like basketball
• Basketball is a very popular sport in Turkey.
• My father played in a national basketball team from 2005 to 2007.
• These topic sentenves do not lend themselves to development of ideas. Compare them to
the following topic senetences.
Writing Skills 2
• I like basketball primarily because it let’s me play a game in a team.
• In this sentence “team play” is the key word that enables both focalization and
development of ideas.
Writing Skills 1
• Basketball became popular in Turkey for the first time after the TV show “The White Shadow” became
fashionable in the 1980s.
• This sentence, too, enables both focalization and
development. In the rest of the paragraph you can explain how people who watch the show started either watching and playing basketball, how people started going to the halls to watch basketball and how the number of
basketball teams increased all around the country.
