Paragraph Structure (Part 1) transcript

a good English paragraph always starts with a topic sentence now I should say usually the topic sentence is the first sentence but sometimes it's the second sentence of a paragraph now the topic sentence always tells the reader okay what is the main idea of my paragraph let's look at some examples of some topic sentences I love going out for dinner my dog had a terrible experience last week and police are an important part of the community these are some good examples of topic sentences and everything in my paragraph is going to describe this sentence maybe my paragraph some sentences will uh describe and give details and maybe some sentences will give examples about this topic sentence so everything in the paragraph is describing the topic sentence now be careful with your main idea your main idea can't be too General if it is too General it's not clear well what are you going to write about and don't make your topic sentence or main idea don't make it too specific if it is too specific and it has many many Det details well what are you going to write about in your paragraph because your topic sentence has so many details you can't write about this sentence there's just too many details and also do not announce your topic and what do I mean well don't write I would like to write about or I want to write about no we don't do this in English let's look at some examples of some bad topic sentences I want to write about when I was in school okay this has two problems the first problem is I want to write about we don't do this in English and number two it's too General when I was in school well what when I was in school your studies your hobbies your sports your friends what what do you want to write about it's too General the next example students always made stupid jokes and made fun of me well this has too much in this is this is too specific it has too many details because it's going to be very difficult to write a paragraph about this sentence so how can we fix this well here's a good example I had terrible experiences when I was in school so now in the paragraph I can give information and details and examples about this sentence now be careful because my students often make the mistake that in one paragraph maybe they have more than one main idea don't do this in English one paragraph only has one main idea if you want to talk about a different thing well it must be in a different paragraph Okay so one paragraph one main idea now I'm going to give you an example of a nice nicely written paragraph and look at the topic sentence in blue you'll see that everything in the paragraph is describing the topic sentence if you'd like to practice that more click on the link under the video