Underrated Writing Skill: Writing A Great Paragraph
If there’s one thing you should be consistently thinking about while writing, it’s how to write a great paragraph. Dedicate yourself to perfecting the paragraph you’re working on and you won’t have to worry about anything else.
A paragraph is the founding block of any writing genre. It doesn’t matter if it’s an email or an essay, a sentence or more, a beginning or an end—thinking in paragraphs is an essential step of clear writing.
Writing, and thinking, in paragraphs put you at an advantage because even though they’re the building block of any written material, most people don’t ask themselves why they’re starting a paragraph or why they’re ending one.
Exactly what do we communicate in a paragraph? A single idea that serves our main topic. That’s why paragraphs should be logically tied to each other. Whether you’re explaining something to others or yourself, your ideas need to be separated for easier digestion and arranged in a logical sequence. And that’s what paragraphs do: they fence our ideas and sort them—all in service of our main topic.
First, start with writing a one-sentence paragraph. This won’t be your paragraph’s final form. What we’re doing here is forcing our brain to think in paragraphs: if your paragraph should only carry one sentence, what’ll you write? There’ll be no option but to produce a focused, uninterrupted line of text that directly explains your paragraph’s main idea. When you’re satisfied with your one-sentence paragraph, you can expand it to full length.
