Schaffer paragraph

Abstract: I find discussing paragraphs with my students extraordinarily difficult; I am never sure if I am being too prescriptive or too open-ended when I make my tentative suggestions on their writing. The immense complexities of para graphs' structures?how they duel with their neighbors, with the whole es say, with ambiguous sections and divisions, and of course with their nebulous, rebel lious contents known as sentences?it all feels impossible to explain sometimes. Seek ing assistance, I naturally started a hunt for theory concerning the paragraph, and I found a long, unresolved debate about how paragraphs should be taught, as well as about their intrinsic nature. But there was something odd about the scholarship. In the last fifteen or so years, there has not been any major work on paragraph theory in composition. The last theoretical discussion of the subject in journals appears to be Rick Eden and Ruth Mitchell's largely unanswered "Paragraphing for the Reader" in 1986 and Frank D'Angelo's splendid literature review of the topic sentence from the same CCC is sue. Save for some scattered empirical work, such as Randall Popken's four studies of topic sentence genres from 1987 to 1991, paragraph theory has all but disap peared from composition research. In the mid-1960s, and up to even the early 1980s, published work on paragraph theory was common. Scholars such as Francis Christensen and Paul Rodgers wresded with the nature of the paragraph, and empirical work such as Richard Braddock's 1974 study of topic sentences broke new ground. The debate was not new, of course. Ever since Joseph Angus's 1862 Handbook of the English Tongue provided twenty pages of paragraphing tips and Alexander Bain's immensely influential 1866 edition of

Abstract: his piece actually began as an assignment in which each of us were to write a paragraph on "education." As I remember it, this led to the idea that we collect them together in a kind of anthology. This was followed by the chain-letter method of sending on paragraph around to each person for comment. The result of that is what you see here.

Abstract: Paragraphs are the building blocks of essays. A sound knowledge of paragraph structuring leads to well-written and readable essays. On the contrary, a lack of paragraph writing skills culminates into a farrago of ideas scattered haphazardly in the essay, thereby affecting paragraph unity and coherence, which in turn impacts negatively on the packaging of ideas in the essay. This study has been prompted by my observation over the years of paragraph construction difficulties polytechnic students face in their academic writing, and also the paucity of research in polytechnic writing. As a result, this paper set to investigate how students structure their paragraphs in terms of topic sentence use and support sentences. A corpus of 120 essays was collected from four departments in Kumasi Polytechnic, Kumasi, Ghana and using Bain’s paragraph principles as a benchmark to analyse them, the results revealed that 66% of the essays employed definite paragraph format. The study also found numerous one-sentence paragraphs leading to the creation of indentations, with reckless abandon. The results of the study have implications for the teaching of writing skills in polytechnics.

Abstract: Writing is one of the important skills should be mastered by students of English education program. Mastering writing forces students to be able to produce good paragraph. Paragraph is said to be good if it is well organized. Organizing good paragraph is the problem faced by the second semester students of English education of Sultan Agung Islamic University. Based on that problem, the writer decided to apply indirect feedback to the students’ paragraph writing. The writer wants to know the way indirect feedback applied to improve the students’ paragraph writing. The writer used action research to come up to the objective of the research. There was one cycle of the research which consisted of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. The writer adopted the steps of analyzing the data as proposed by Burns (1999) which consisted of assembling, coding, comparing, building meaning and interpretation and reporting the outcomes. The result was that the way the writer used underline to the students’ writing could improve the students’ paragraph writing. The students could provide correct final revision of their inappropriate writing