Paragraph structure
Good paragraph structure makes your writing clear and easy to follow. It helps readers understand your ideas and makes it obvious that you’ve met the assessment requirements.
Constructing a strong paragraph
In the body section of essays, reports and similar assignments, your paragraphs should be presented in a logical order according to how one main idea connects with the next main idea.
The best way to achieve a logical order is through planning. Before you start writing the paragraphs, set out the structure of your paragraph topics.
It's important that one paragraph = one idea.
As a rule, begin a new paragraph each time you want to introduce a new:
- idea or topic
- part of your argument.
Calculate how any paragraphs you need
Distribute the word count evenly among the paragraphs. This gives you a goal for the length of each body paragraph.
Now that you have the overall structure of your essay planned out, you can go on to planning the individual paragraphs themselves.