A successful paragraph is like a mini essay. Instead of a thesis, it has a topic sentence. Instead of mapping components, the paragraph has supporting details.
An A paragraph contains the following: Structurally, it contains a topic sentence, either explicit or implicit; it has supporting concrete details; its supporting details logically follow the other, which give the paragraph coherence; it contains transitions (avoid, if you can, elementary transitions such as first, second, third, and so on), which give the paragraph cohesiveness. Rhetorically speaking, an A paragraph should be written in a passionate, distinctive voice. The language should be precise, lively, and colorful, reflecting the writer’s passion for the subject.
A successful paragraph has the following:
1. topic sentence (mini thesis)
2. supporting details
3. unity: all the supporting details are relevant to the topic sentence
4. cohesiveness: all the supporting details logically follow the other with the help of transitions. Advanced writers attempt to use transitions other than the familiar “first . . . second . . . third . . . Finally”
5. concluding sentence (optional)
Sample A Paragraph Response
The innovation of the iPod and its marriage partner, iTunes, have seemingly created Listening Paradise for the music lover. Now you can have thousands of songs at your fingertips and customize your own playlists, make ratings, burn your own CDs and in essence believe that it's you--not the recording artists--who is the “creative genius” for all your music. But in fact, you will most likely face the sad truth that as you amass thousands upon thousands of songs, you will reach a point in which your ability to appreciate music will actually diminish, not deepen, because having tens of thousands of songs and hundreds of playlists will degrade your music listening pleasure. The first thing you’ll notice is that you won’t even remember what songs you have and the treasures that used to give you so much joy become buried under a pile of newer and newer songs that muddle your memory. The second thing that will happen is that in your determination to listen to as much of your music as possible, you will create huge playlists and the music will play all day and night as you multi-task at your computer so that you’re not really focusing on music the way you used to. Your relationship with music has changed drastically to the point that it is now a form of “wallpaper,” a droning in the distance that swaths you with a feeling of security. But whatever security you gain from cocooning yourself in your music, you will lose from becoming more and more self-conscious about what kind of songs you own because you’ll become aware that you live in a culture in which your identity is judged largely on your playlists and “brand identity” as determined by your music tastes will become more important than actually enjoying music. Finally, when you have hundreds and hundreds of playlists, you will suffer from “choice anxiety.” Fretting over what to play and always worrying that you’re neglecting a huge chunk of your music will become a distraction that compromises your music-listening experience. Thus we are a culture with the technology capable of fitting 40,000 songs on an iPod, but our brains cannot embrace that much music without suffering some kind of permanent meltdown.
Another Example of an A Paragraph
A paragraph that explains why Octo-Mom stirs the hostility of so many (transitions underlined) :
The California woman who relied on the dubious practices of a fertility doctor to give birth to 14 children, has become a national demon who stirs our most primitive fears and hostilities and compels us to gather our pitchforks and torches and to chase her from our midst. Her demonic reputation exists in part because she has become a metaphor for the malignant parasite whose ravenous, pathological appetite to bear bus loads of children with legal and government sanction stirs the general public’s greatest Malthusian nightmare: Paying the hefty tax tab to cater to the wild irresponsible desire of an emotionally-arrested woman whose sole passions in life are to bear more children than she can take care of and to liken her image to celebrity goddess Angelina Jolie. Her reputation as a monster is reinforced by her very title, Octo-Mom, which suggests a malevolent invader who bears similarities to the pod creatures inInvasion of the Body Snatchers. Finally, our resentment is vindicated when it is reported that she and her litter will live in luxury paid for by the generosity of others, thus making us feel like it is the grossly irresponsible in this world who are rewarded while the rest of us who play by the rules having nothing to look forward to in this life except for getting punked.
Sample of Introductory Narrative Paragraph That Leads to Your Thesis
As an infant I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket. Tattered and pee-stained, Geekee was my prize possession, my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me every where I went for my first four years on this planet. At night, I rubbed the blanket’s corners on my cheek, the pleasant tickling sensation lulling me to sleep. To my consternation, my parents were not as enamored with Geekee as I was. They complained that Geekee smelled. It was threadbare. It had visible stains that I paraded to the public who must have believed that my parents were too cheap to buy me a new blanket. At four years of age I had “outgrown” Geekee, they said, and it was time Geekee and I part ways. Every time they suggested getting rid of it, I would go into a rage that would not subside until they dropped the business of me losing Geekee. This battle between my parents and me continued until one day, as we were moving across the country from Florida to California my father slyly opened his window and told me to look out the window opposite his, for he said there was a baby alligator on the side of the road. As I looked in vain to spot the alligator, my father ripped Geekee from my hands and threw it out his open window. It all happened so fast that I didn’t know my father had grabbed my blanket. Instead, I believed his lie that the powerful wind had sucked Geekee from my grasp and had flung the blanket out of the window. I told my father to stop the car at once. We had to retrieve Geekee. But my father said we had to keep on going. Besides, he said, Geekee was now keeping the baby alligator warm. With no mother to fend for him, the little reptile needed the blanket’s warmth far more than I did. Imagining the baby alligator swathed in my blanket consoled me somewhat. At least Geekee had not gone to waste. While losing Geekee had caused a minor trauma, I got over the loss in a day or two.
Everyone has had some form of a Geekee or other, something that comforts us because of the familiarity and the attachment we have formed with it. But security blankets such as a child’s literal blanket are easy to identify. As the short fiction of Tobias Wolff shows us, there are other security blankets, far more insidious, that often confine or cripple us without our knowing it so that our dependence on them becomes in essence a Faustian Bargain. To better understand these types of security blankets, we should break them down into four categories. First, there is “the tiger’s claw beneath the velvet carpet,” the comfortable sanctuary that is killing us even as we coast along our stagnant existence without any apparent suffering and therefore have no motivation for change. Second, there is the power symbol, which becomes so important to our sense of status and identity that we coddle it at the expense of respecting others. Third, there are props we rely on because these props, we believe, flatter us and make us more appealing to others. These props could include a particular wardrobe, a mustache, spiked hair or anything we believe gives us a “special look” that flatters us. These props may have increased our cachet at one time, but over time those who are dependent on their props eventually become pathetic parodies of themselves. Fourth, there are those who are so oblivious to their dependence on security blankets that their entire existence can be defined by a vast network of security blankets from which these dependent souls are forever entangled.
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