Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice. He had seen it both times. Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost a blur at its high speed, go past, and a second later heard the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, a moment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane.
This paragraph begins the story. It describes an event that frightened Jonas. At first, he had been only fascinated. He had never seen aircraft so close, for it was against the rules for Pilots to fly over the community.
Occasionally, when supplies were delivered by cargo planes to the landing field across the river, the children rode their bicycles to the riverbank and watched, intrigued, the unloading and then the takeoff directed to the west, always away from the community.
A shift takes place from the past to the present. But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but a needle-nosed single-pilot jet. Jonas, looking around anxiously, had seen others—adults as well as children—stop what they were doing and wait, confused, for an explanation of the frightening event. A new paragraph is created to go back to describing the event that took place in the past. Another time shift takes place.
Each time a different character speaks, create a new paragraph. Note that this is also true with thoughts. If the narrator is describing the thoughts of one character and a different character speaks or has his or her thoughts described, start a new paragraph. Narrator describes Mom. If a character gives a long speech, it is easier for the reader if the dialogue is broken up. Teaching Moment — Encourage students to break up long bits of narration with action.
For example, if a flashback is taking place, have the character come back to the present, describe what is taking place, and then go back to the flashback. Gary Paulsen is a master at storytelling. He often breaks the principles of writing with sentence fragments and other unconventional methods. Many short paragraphs keep his writing sounding urgent. I have included an excerpt from Hatchet not to illustrate paragraph breaks but to show how a flashback can be interrupted with present events.
Now Brian sat, looking out the window with the roar thundering through his ears, and tried to catalog what had led up to his taking this flight. The thinking started. Always it started with a single word. It was an ugly word, he thought. A tearing, ugly word that meant fights and yelling, lawyers—God, he thought, how he hated lawyers who sat with their comfortable smiles and tried to explain to him in legal terms how all that he lived in was coming apart—and the breaking and shattering of all the solid things.
His home, his life—all the solid things. A breaking word, an ugly breaking word…. A topic sentence is a sentence that indicates in a general way what idea or thesis the paragraph is going to deal with. Although not all paragraphs have clear-cut topic sentences, and despite the fact that topic sentences can occur anywhere in the paragraph as the first sentence, the last sentence, or somewhere in the middle , an easy way to make sure your reader understands the topic of the paragraph is to put your topic sentence near the beginning of the paragraph.
This is a good general rule for less experienced writers, although it is not the only way to do it. Regardless of whether you include an explicit topic sentence or not, you should be able to easily summarize what the paragraph is about. The topic which is introduced by the topic sentence should be discussed fully and adequately.
Again, this varies from paragraph to paragraph, depending on the author's purpose, but writers should be wary of paragraphs that only have two or three sentences. It's a pretty good bet that the paragraph is not fully developed if it is that short.
Two very important elements of paragraphing are signposts and transitions. Signposts are internal aids to assist readers; they usually consist of several sentences or a paragraph outlining what the article has covered and where the article will be going. Transitions are usually one or several sentences that "transition" from one idea to the next. Transitions can be used at the end of most paragraphs to help the paragraphs flow one into the next. Sometimes you simply want a paragraph to stand out, or you want to slow the reader down and control the pace of the story.
At times like this, you can make a brief sentence--or even a word--an entire paragraph. Just don't overdo it; this gets old fast. Here are some examples, excerpted from the novel Kate Macready and the Pirates. They are color coded when possible to show which type of paragraph break is being used: yellow for new topic, brown for new time, purple for new place, light blue for new speaker, dark blue for an action that takes the place of some dialogue, and green for dramatic effect.
The one good thing I could see was that the water was so shallow where the Narwhal went down that, once I broke clear of the ship, I didn't have far to go to reach the surface. By the time I broke the surface, I had almost given up hope, but I found myself in the air and took a huge, gulping gasp. I splashed around, happy just to be alive. That's when the hand reached down and grabbed me. Before I had a chance to think, I had been hauled into a small boat and dumped there like a load of fish.
I opened my eyes and was surprised--and happy--to see Jeremy staring down at me. I sat up, outraged. Of course not. But did you get it? I pulled the map, now waterlogged, from the folds of my shirt and tossed it to the floor of the boat. Jeremy looked visibly relieved. I shrugged.
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