I propose that we think about what a paragraph is by considering its "function," what it does in a piece of writing, whether in a popular novel, a newspaper article, an e-mail, a business report, or a lofty piece of literary criticism. We might think about a paragraph as a "rhetorical dwelling."

Seductive details are interesting, but sometimes irrelevant to the target material present in texts and lectures. In the current study, 388 undergraduate students read six paragraphs describing Sigmund Freud's psychosexual stages (i.e., target material). Participants in four groups also read one of two biographical paragraphs. The biographical…

Is Skim reading effective? How do readers allocate their attention selectively? The authors report 3 experiments that use expository texts and allow readers only enough time to read half of each document. Experiment 1 found that, relative to reading half the text, skimming improved memory for important ideas from a text but did not improve memory…

Several English as a second language (ESL) expository compositions written by four Arab college freshman students majoring in English are analyzed. The analysis is intended to describe intersentence structural relationships. Sixty-nine percent of the sentences the students wrote were coordinate sentences. There was no correlation between verbal…

Suggests an exercise to be used in a creative writing class to help students learn the various techniques available for characterization. (TJ)

Presents a theory and model of the paragraph which is useful in teaching students to make generalizations about paragraph structure. (DD)

Suggests that using Francis Christensen's method of analyzing paragraphs can help students improve their own paragraph development. (TJ)

Summarizes a method for teaching composition that allows for practice in straight composition, the opportunity for self-expression, and the getting of feedback by asking students to write a paragraph in response to a specific question about the text for the week and a second paragraph of reaction to the text. (TJ)

Explains an exercise in which logical relationships are isolated in order to help students discover how to choose their material for paragraphs. (TJ)

Describes a simple structuring device for teaching paragraphing skills which focuses the student's attention on the subject of the paragraph and a specific interest in the subject. Outlines how to use the method for showing basic writers how to proceed to longer compositions. (HB)

Describes a method for teaching students in college composition courses how to construct a paragraph. (RB)

Today's paragraph is not a logical unity, and we should stop telling our students that it is. (DD)

Presents and discusses a descriptive paragraph useful for teaching composition students how rhetorical fragments work in writing and why sentence fragments do not. (HTH)

Proposes a formula for helping students learn to write paragraphs by requiring highly disciplined and limited material and sentences until students have acquired skills that permit more variety. (TJ)

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…