DEMONSTRATION ONLY: This demonstration presents an abbreviated version of the complete PLACE course. Click 'Next' at the bottom of the screen or make a selection from the links on the left to begin. Not all links are available for the demo.
Recognize Effective Organization in Writing
Recognizing Methods of Paragraph Organization
Good college writing is expected to be well developed. You should have plenty of support for your main points in any piece of writing.
In general, you can develop a main idea with:
- reasons,
- concrete details,
- specific examples,
- facts,
- statistics, and
- incidents or narratives.
Most essays use a variety of these methods. Unfortunately, there is no magic number of supporting sentences required to support a main idea; you are expected to use your judgment, tempered by your experience.
Generally, introductory and concluding paragraphs are considerably shorter than body paragraphs. In general, body paragraphs that are very short — one to three sentences — are not well-developed and are not acceptable in college-level writing.
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