PARAGRAPH DEVELOPMENT
Paragraph development is positive
approach to essay writers, and in the other hand invaluable because, at one
level at least, an essay is a collection of paragraphs. An essay therefore is more than this, of course it is the
deliberate development in clear, well reasoned prose of one or more ideas
through several paragraphs to achieve a
desired effect upon a known audience, the effect being the reader’s understanding
of and respect for the writer’s point of view on a given topic.
Since an essay
is longer and more complex than paragraph, then, an essay requires more
planning, more sustained control of ideas and a greater knowledge of techniques
for expressing and “flashing out” skeletal ideas.
PRE-WRITING
Pre-writing is all the preparation which you the writer must
make before you begin to write the first draft of your essay. Pre-writing is a
series of interrelated steps which enables you not merely to organize your material
in the most effective way to suit your topic but, more importantly, allows you
to decide upon the direction your paper will take long before you write it. The
pre-writing steps are:
1. Selecting a topic
2. Forming a point of view
3. Searching for fact
4. Analyzing and arranging the facts
5. Drawing up an outline
Selecting a Topic
Whether you are given a topic or asked to find one, you
should remember the following.
a. Choose a topic that you know something about. May be you select
“unemployment” above “crude oil theft” because you feel that there are
countless instances of rising inflation around you and you have some
suggestions for curbing it.
b. Make sure you choose a topic that you find interesting. Your interest is
infectious and it will be readily communicated to your reader. If you don’t
find the subject of “unemployment” or crude oil theft interesting, then try
other ideas as possible.
c. You should choose a topic that you can handle adequately in the time and
space allowed. What is appropriate for a term paper for which you are allowed
several months and many hundreds of words is certainly not appropriate for a
500 words essay required in a week’s time. In the letter case, instead of “The
role of Education in a developing nation” you would do better with topic such
as:
· Corporal punishment in secondary schools
· Effect of adult education into Nigeria Education
· Important of Western education in our society today
Forming a Point of
View
Here there are little technically
involved. Whatever the topic you choose, you should form a point of view about
it. In other words, you should decide
what, in essence, you want to say about your topic. “Some Discipline Problem in
Secondary Schools”. After some thought, some milling over of ideas relevant to
the topic such as secondary schools, kinds of discipline problems, reasons for
and effects of discipline problems, you might decide that in your essay you
will show that:
1. Discipline problems in secondary schools stem from the home or
2. Indiscipline in secondary schools reflects indiscipline in society.
3. Discipline problems in secondary schools destroy the teacher pupil
relationship, undermine respect and authority and above all, rob the students
of a decent education.
There are potentially as many
points of view as there are students in a class, though many points of view
will be close to each other. The important thing is that you should think about
your topic until you discover what you want to say about it. Your point of view
will then become the heart of the essay, as it were, and all you write by way
of reasons, illustrates and details will be directed to making the point of view clear. As soon as you have formed a
point of view, you should write it down as simply as you can in one sentence.
This sentence is called a thesis statement and the thesis statement will help
you judge which ideas you should admit as relevant to your topic and which
ideas you should exclude as irrelevant.
Searching for Facts
With topic and point of view fixed
in your mind, you may search for supporting facts from two sources: the private
source of your own direct experiences and the public source of books of your
own direct experiences and the public source of books, magazines, articles and
reports, oral or written. The private sources is nearly always enough to cope
with most short essay assignment. That is, you have enough in your background
and in your environment to draw ideas, illustrations and attitudes necessary
for essay writing. Of course, wide reading increases your store of general
information while lively awareness of your environment increases your stock of
examples.
In searching for facts for the
short essay, you should job down as quickly as possible on a blank sheet paper
all your ideas about the topic and point of view. The jotting must be quick
with on time spent in determining whether particular ideas are good relevant or
correct. The more quickly you write the more ideas you will think of, for
psychologist tell us that by association one idea will trigger another, if the
flow of ideas is uninterrupted.
Another aid to generating ideas is
to bombard the topic with questions, what, when, where, how, why. For example,
the following are some of the questions you might ask if your topic and thesis
statement are shown.
Analyzing and
Arranging Facts
Since you cannot depend upon
having listed your ideas in my order, you must now scrutinize your list and
arrange your ideas into groups that will represent major ideas in your essay.
Irrelevant ideas must go. Ideas that stand alone without much else to support
them should either be developed more fully, if possible, incorporated into some
other group entirely.
Drawing up an
Outline
Arranging and ordering your ideas
in groups in this way amounts to an outline. With the inclusion of the thesis
statement and the headings, introduction and conclusion, this short outline
would be sufficient of enable you to write a clear and coherent essay in which
ideas, amply supported, are introduced in their proper places. For longer
essays, you should draw up a fuller outline indicating major ideas, secondary ideas
and details.