ESL 141: Reading and Writing 4

Body Paragraphs of an Essay

The body paragraphs develop, explain, or support the essay’s thesis. Effective body
paragraphs have the following characteristics.

A. Unity: Each paragraph develops only one idea, excluding any details that do not
support the main idea / topic sentence. Note how the writer stays focused on one topic in
the example paragraph below.

Another problem facing a number of elderly people is living on a reduced

income. Upon retiring, old people can receive a pension from their company or Social
Security from the government. The amount of their monthly checks is often half the
amount of the checks they receive when they are employed. Suddenly, retirees find that
they can no longer continue the lifestyle that they had become accustomed to, even if that
lifestyle was a modest one. Many find, after paying their monthly bills, that there is no
money left for a movie or a dinner out. Some of the older people, however, discover that
the small amount of money they receive will not even cover their monthly bills. They
realize with horror that electricity, a telephone, and nourishing food are luxuries they can
no longer afford. They resort to shivering in in the dark, counting every penny in order to
make ends meet.
(Adapted from Smalley, et. al., Refining Composition Skills, p. 26)

Practice 1: Now read the following paragraphs. Underline the topic sentence and cross
out any sentences that do not belong in the paragraphs.

a. The most obvious problem with being unemployed is not having the money you
need for daily life. Most people need money for necessities - paying the rent and buying
food. And even though buying clothes may not be a necessity, it is still important. If you
don’t have a job, who is going to give you the money for rent and food? Maybe you have
an uncle or a cousin who will let you borrow a little bit of money for a month or two, but
most people can’t afford to pay for other people’s rent. So if you don’t have a job, you
will have trouble paying the rent and buying food.
(Smalley, et. al., Refining Composition Skills, p. 27)

b. After many years of working toward eliminating poverty, Dr. Muhammad Yunus does
not consider himself a charity worker, but a social business entrepreneur. In 1974, Dr.
Yunus learned that poor people in a village near the Bangladeshi university where he
worked were paying 10% interest a week on loans needed for raw materials to make
baskets or stools or other goods. Dr. Yunus taught economics at the university. When they
sold their finished product, the workers were left with only a penny or two of profit for a
day’s work. Instead of giving them charity, Dr. Yunus decided to loan $27 to 42 basket
weavers to help them break the cycle of poverty. It worked very well, and everyone of the
basket weavers paid him back. Soon after, Dr. Yunus founded Grameen bank, which
means village bank, as a bank especially for the poor, with typical loans of about $12.
Grameen bank has been profitable since 1992 and has not needed donor money to
operate. In 2006 Grameen Bank and Dr. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. Nine
borrowers/owners of Grameen Bank were elected to accept the prize with him. Now, Dr.
Yunus uses the money from the prize to encourage others to think about ways to establish
profitable businesses that also work to eliminate social problems.
(Smalley, et. al., Refining Composition Skills, p. 27)

B. Topic Sentence: The topic sentence, which expresses the main idea of the paragraph,
may be placed at different locations in the paragraph: the beginning, the end, the
beginning and end, and the middle. See the examples below culled from
http://www.ntid.rit.edu/sea/processes/paragraph/process/placement

Beginning

Constructing a wedding cake is a complicated process. Before any baking

takes place, the size of the cake and the decorative design to be used must be determined.
Then the layers are baked. On a large cake the bottom layers may be as much as sixteen
inches in diameter. Because of their size, these layers must be baked one at a time, a
process which may actually take an entire day. Once the layers are cooled, same-size
pairs are matched and frosted. Since large wedding cakes are surprisingly heavy, half-
inch dowel rods must be measured, cut, and carefully driven into the bottom layers. These
wooden posts provide hidden support for the weighty upper layers. When all the layers
are set in place, flowers, garlands and leaves of frosting are added. These delicate touches
individualize the wedding cake and transform it from merely a cake into a culinary work
of art.

End

People do it everyday. They log on to their favorite website and browse for hours,
checking out bargains. They dump every possible wish into their shopping carts, knowing
they can cast each one aside before they finalize their purchases. On the way, they may
enter a sweepstakes in the hopes of winning a trip to Cabo San Lucas, or maybe even a
new SUV. And then, when they have decided on their purchases, they enter private
information without giving it a thought. With a keystroke, they release their personal data
into what may or may not be a secure zone. Despite what much of the public believes,
internet shopping is not safe.

Beginning and end

Throwing a clay pot, the age old art of making pottery on a wheel, is a
process that requires many steps. Assuming the potter does not have to make his own
clay, the first step toward the finished product is wedging the clay. Here, the potter
kneads the clay to prepare it for throwing. Wedging cannot be rushed. A minimum of fifty
turns is required to rid the clay of air pockets and align its molecules. Once wedged and
formed into a ball, the clay is thrown onto the center of a potter's wheel. Now the material
must be centered. Centering not only takes strength but time as well. The clay must be
coerced into a perfectly symmetrical shape, dead center on the spinning wheel. To
proceed with poorly centered clay is to court certain disaster in the form of tilting, uneven
pots, or worse, the total collapse of the piece. When correctly centered, the clay is ready
to be opened. To do this, the potter finds the center of the clay and slowly sinks a rigid
finger into the still-spinning clay. Only now can the clay be shaped. With a steady but
gentle hand, the potter pulls up the sides of the pot until the desired height is reached.
Now the shaping is completed and the pot is ready to be dried, fired, and glazed. Thus,
even though a clay pot may appear simple to make, fashioning one by hand is a long
and sometimes tedious process.

Middle

When a camera flash is used in a low-light environment, the subject's eyes may
appear red in the finished photograph. What is known as "red-eye" is the result of light
from the flash reflecting off the pupils of the eyes. The phenomenon of red-eye can be
lessened by using the red-eye reduction feature found on many SLR cameras. This
feature activates a lamp which shines a small light directly into the subject's eyes. When
this happens, the diameter of the pupil is reduced, thus tightening the opening in the iris.
Since a smaller pupil means a smaller host for the reflection, the chances of red-eye
occurring are greatly reduced.

Practice 2: Locate the topic sentences in the following paragraphs.

a. What my mother never told me was how fast time passes in adult life. I
remember, when I was little, thinking I would live to be at least as old as my
grandmother, who was dynamic even at ninety-two, the age at which she died. Now I see
those ninety-two years hurtling by me. And my mother never told me how fun sex could
be, or what a discovery it is. Of course, I am of the age when mothers really didn’t tell
you much about anything. My mother never told me about the facts of life.
(Reinking and von der Osten, Strategies for Successful Writing, p. 87)

b. At the most fundamental level, scientific explanation of the world is akin to the
process of reading and writing. Whether studying skull structures, geological layers, or
bird populations, scientists were deciphering sign systems and interpreting texts. Both the
geologist Charles Lyell and the neurobiologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal compared
themselves with the linguist Jean François Champillon, who decoded the Egyptian
hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. Highly conscious of their roles as communicators,
scientists did not need critics like Arnold to point out their affinity to ordinary writers.
They illustrated it themselves in their own text.
(Reinking and von der Osten, Strategies for Successful Writing, p. 87)

c. They came up to my car window: a lady with her crooked nose and sensitive
smile asked me for a ride home. She was in pain from walking such a long distance. Her
husband spoke not a word, then. I had been on my way to a lecture on the “community”
and “how to be a better person.” Not being able to resist a person in distress, I naively
allowed them to enter my car, my life and my imagination. First, they sat too close to me:
she in the front seat gasping for air, or so it seemed, and he in the back seat managing to
stretch his ostrich-like neck between me and her. He misled us, gave inaccurate
commands to turn, and therefore, the seemingly short ride home turned into an endless
maze of fear. By now, my imagination had taken control of me. They were not ordinary
people, but had some unexpressed evil reason for urging me into their diabolical scheme.
Cordially excusing themselves, they asked to be left at the next corner for they could find
their way better on foot. A nervous wreck, I realized that in this society there is so much
mistrust that to help someone in distress is considered a risk.
(www.ric.edu/rfeldstein)

d. Writing a paragraph used to be easy, but now the construction of a well

developed, well constructed paragraph has become difficult because of the mathematical
preciseness one must bring to the writing process. What is so difficult about writing a
paragraph? When we were ignorant of the rules of paragraph writing, any group of
sentences were able to be haphazardly assembled and effortlessly passed off as a
paragraph. But now one is forced to follow a precise outline for building a paragraph. The
naïve construction of a paragraph no longer is sufficient to an aware writer. Now we must
have a strong topic sentence because it is the backbone of the whole paragraph, and every
key element becomes a piece of the backbone’s vertebrae. The topic sentence is
connected to the controlling idea, which acts like the brain of the system with each
element under its command. Every idea and sentence meshes together in the conquest for
unity of idea. Each piece of the puzzle is carefully placed down with an eye to its relation
to all of the other components. All of the elements in the topic sentence work in unison,
like the fingers on a hand, to complement all the other elements of the succeeding or
following sentences. What used to be an easy process, however, has now given way to a
complex system of mathematical equations – the set as well-written paragraph. Paragraph
writing has become a “mechanical process” completely at odds with style and grace as
one writes inspiration into syntax. This constriction makes the writing of the paragraph
difficult for writers who have an artistic sensibility.
(www.ric.edu/rfeldstein)

C. Adequate Development: Each paragraph should be well developed, i. e. should

contain enough details or information that explains the topic sentence. Such details may
include examples, reasons, facts and statistics, personal experiences, expert opinions,
and visuals. Here are examples of an underdeveloped paragraph and an adequately
developed one.

Underdeveloped paragraph

Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 feared too much
democracy. As a result, they drafted the Constitution as a document outlining a limited
democracy. Indeed, some of the provisions were simply undemocratic. But despite
reflecting the delegates’ distrust of popular rule, the Constitution did provide the
framework in which democracy could evolve.
(Reinking and von der Osten, Strategies for Successful Writing, p. 89)
Adequately developed paragraph

Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 feared too much
democracy. As a result, they drafted the Constitution as a document outlining a limited
democracy. Indeed, some of the provisions were simply undemocratic: universal
suffrage was denied; voting qualifications were left to the states; and women, blacks,
and persons without property were denied the federal franchise. Until the passage of
the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, senators were not popularly elected but were
chosen by state legislators. But despite reflecting the delegates’ distrust of popular rule,
the Constitution did provide the framework in which democracy could evolve.
(Reinking and von der Osten, Strategies for Successful Writing, p. 89)

D. Organization: Each paragraph must be organized according to a principle or pattern

of development, e.g. time sequence or chronology, space order, comparison and contrast,
cause and effect, problem-solution, process analysis, definition, classification, argument,
logical order. Study the following examples carefully to see how each principle has been
used.

Time sequence / chronology

Theo's day began with a shock. As soon as he arrived at the office that morning,
he learned that his best friend was dead. Wasn't it just twelve hours ago that they were
eating chicken wings and tipping back beer in front of a baseball game at the Cooper's
Bar and Grill? After a long day of crunching numbers at the office, they stopped at a bar
for a Thursday afternoon happy hour. They saw a few coworkers there, and before they
knew it, it was closing time. Bill got in a car with someone he met just that evening and
that was the last time Theo saw him.
(http://www.learnamericanenglishonline.com/Write_in_English/
WL12_narrative_paragraphs.html)

Space order

Lake Calhoun is a great place to swim and relax. In the summer, the water is warm and
clean, and the beaches are large enough to accommodate groups of people seeking relief
from a midsummer scorcher. In addition to swimming, visitors to the lake can go
canoeing, sailing, windsurfing, or fishing. The blue water is a refreshing, tempting sight.
The sweet scent of sun block wafts through the air from sunbathers lying on the beach.
Children laugh and splash in the water, and nearby volleyball games stir passionate
shouts in the heat of competition. Meanwhile lifeguards sit atop their towers and make
sure everyone is safe. In the distance, sail boats catch the soft breezes that cross the lake
and canoeists glide quietly past. This is what summer is all about!

(http://www.learnamericanenglishonline.com/Write_in_English/
WL11_descriptive_paragraphs.html)
Process

Making beer nuts is a quick, simple process that provides a delicious evening snack.
You’ll need six cups of raw peanuts, three cups of sugar, and one-an-a half cups of water.
To begin, combine the sugar and water in a two-quart saucepan and stir to dissolve the
sugar. Next, add the peanuts and stir again until all the peanuts are covered by the sugar-
water solution. Leave the pan, uncovered, on a burner set at medium-high heat for ten to
twelve minutes, until the sugar crystallizes and coats the peanuts thoroughly. Stay at the
stove during the heating process and stir the mixture every two or three minutes to ensure
even coating of the nuts. When the peanuts are thoroughly coated, pour them onto an
ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for about thirty minutes, stirring and
lightly salting at ten-minute intervals. Serve your beer nuts fresh out of the oven or eat
them at room temperature.
(Reinking and von der Osten, Strategies for Successful Writing, p. 91-92)

E. Coherence: The sentences in each paragraph must be logically arranged and flow
smoothly. Coherence can be achieved by repeating key words, using pronouns to refer
to key nouns in the previous sentences, and using transitions. See the example
paragraph below.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was
obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing
very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and
falling. His mouth was wide open--I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I
waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my
two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood
welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when
the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very
slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet
could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It
seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless
to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and
poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no
impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.
(George Orwell, “The Shooting of an Elephant“, p. 133)

Practice 3: Circle the transition words, single underline the pronouns, and double
underline the repeated key words in the paragraph above.