Paragraph Development

Prewriting Skills

Gathering Ideas: Before you start writing a paragraph, you must gather ideas. Once you select the topic and determine the purpose of the paragraph, you are ready to generate ideas. By generating ideas, you can then select the ones you will use in your paragraph.

There are some pre-writing activities that you should try before writing a paragraph or essay. These arewriting talk, free-writing, brainstorming, clustering, and outlining.


Writing talk: Think about your topic and say it out loud to yourself. This is a brain exercise which helps inspire you. Talk freely about the topic and write down ideas on a paper. These ideas will generally create interest in the reader.

Free-writing: This is very good to let your hand and brain go by writingabout the topic for about 10 minutes without stopping. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, punctuation or organization. Once you finish this activity, your writing will have a mixture of good ideas and other ideas that you don't even know why are there. Don’t worry, that is the purpose. This way you can go back, read what you wrote and select what you will include in your paragraph.Brainstorming: This is a thinking exercise which also helps a lot in generating ideas. You just think about your topic and list all the ideas that come to your mind in no specific order. Don’t write complete sentences or worry about any kind of mistakes. You will do this later when you decide which ideas you will use in your draft.



Example:

Topic: vacationplane

beach

swim

sun

food

money

tickets

summer

no school





Clustering: This activity is more organized because youwill think with the help of a diagram. As in all of the other activities, you don’t worry about grammar, spelling or correct use of words. The purpose of this activity is to narrow a broad subject into a more manageable topic.

Example:

Topic: vacation

Outlining

An outline helps you organize information. It uses key words or word groups to show main topics, subtopics, details, etc.Sample Outline Format:

Title of Outline

I. Drug Abuse

A. Causes

1. Parents' divorce
2. Social problems

a. Alcoholb. School dropouts
c. Horrible living conditions

3. Low self-esteem

B. Effects

1. Physical

a. Loseappetite
b. Slow motion
c. Lose weight

2. Mental

a. Memory loss
b. Mood changesc. Anti social behavior



Helpful Hints - Follow these guidelines to complete your outline:

1. Write the title of your paragraph or essay at the top of the page.

2. Be sure to follow the sample outline format for numbering and lettering

3. Main topics are labeled with Roman numbers: I, II, III,...