Paragraph Unity
Estimated Time: 15 minutes
At the end of the lesson, you will understand how to create a unified paragraph.
How Can I Make My Writing Flow?
We often hear from our students regarding their writing that “I want to make sure that my writing flows.” Or perhaps you have heard students in peer review telling their partner, “Your writing flows well” but they can’t seem to provide a response as to where or how.
When writers refer to “flow,” they are referring to the paper’s organization. Are the ideas are well connected and can the reader easily follow the paper’s logic?
In the first lesson of Week 1, you learned about paragraph structure. You learned that a paragraph focuses on one single central idea. In this lesson, you’ll learn about how to keep your paragraph unified around one main idea. You can find the presentation in the video here.
Points to remember:
- All sentences must be related to the topic sentence.
- Unity aids the reader in following along with the writer’s ideas.
- Irrelevant information disrupts our understanding.
In applying “flow” to a paragraph or essay writing, it is important to be more specific about the kind of smooth movement and clear connections. The terms unity and coherence describe this sense of smoothness and connection.
What is unity in writing? Paragraph unity is the most important characteristic of a good paragraph. Unity refers to how the material in a paragraph is connected and it means that the paragraph discusses one and only one main idea. The topic sentence should introduce the main idea, the supporting details should explain it, and the concluding sentence should end the paragraph with the same idea.
Let’s see a simple example. If your paragraph is about “How to bathe a dog?”, you might feel that you should describe the way your dog behaves when you wash him. But then this description breaks the unity of your paragraph. Although it might be entirely appropriate to explain how you control the dog in the bath, that is not the place to tell a story about your dog. When you finish your paragraph, look it over and cross out any sentence that is not doing its work and keep the ones that are developing the topic sentence.
A useful technique to check paragraph unity when you revise is to read each sentence in sequence and ask yourself a simple question, “Is this sentence logically related to a) the topic of the paragraph and b) to the topic sentence of the paragraph?” If you get two “yeses” for each sentence, your paragraph is most likely unified; if there is a “no” at one or more points, you’ve probably changed subjects or used a supporting point not logically related to your topic.
Why Is Paragraph Unity Important?
When we read, we are processing information. It is important that the information is presented in a way that is logical and reasonable; otherwise, our brains struggle to make sense of it. Unity aids the reader in following along with the writer’s ideas. The reader can expect that a given paragraph will deal only with one main topic; when a new paragraph begins, this signals that the writer is moving on to a new topic. Irrelevant information can disrupt our understanding of a paragraph.
Extras
Check Yourself
Complete the task below to check your understanding of today’s lesson.