Drafting Paragraphs Or, how I learned to stop worrying, love the transition and use doorway/room metaphors to make the concept more concrete.

Paragraph Basics Topic sentences are important as they increase a documents usability by providing an information anchor. With a properly written topic sentence, your reader will understand the upcoming content of a paragraph; your reader will also be prepared to receive additional information about the topic.

The Information Anchor The term information anchor is one Ive created to help reinforce the goal of the topic sentence. Readers constantly work to process the information youre providing and to make meaning of it. Think of the topic sentence like a doorway: readers walk through it to get to a room of ideas. These ideas are the upcoming content prefaced in your topic sentence.

The Doorway So, if you read a topic sentence: Diet and exercise are very important for overweight dogs. Then, you expect to read about: diet, exercise and overweight dogs You dont know why theyre important right now, but you know youll find out.

Walking into the Room Canine obesity is on the rise and over- feeding and lack of exercise are the two major culprits. Overweight dogs, just like humans, can develop many health problems and they may not enjoy life as much. Running, and even walking, may put undue strain on the animal and, in severe cases, the animal dies of a heart attack. How can we prevent this tragedy?

Were in the Room of Ideas If we think of the previous slide as the Room of Ideas, we have the following: 1. Dog diet: over-feeding equals obesity 2. Dog exercise: little exercise equals obesity 3. Dog obesity: health problems 4. Dog obesity: lack of life enjoyment 5. Dog obesity: walking but especially running difficult 6. Dog obesity: weight strain can result in death 7. Preventing dog obesity: what can we do? We could now create 7 more Doorways to 7 more Rooms of Ideas

Building Doorways and Rooms To better understand paragraph drafting, well work with these ideas: 1. First, put the 7 previous topics in a logical order. 2. Second, in groups of 2 or 3, select a topic and write that paragraph. You can use the internet if youre unfamiliar with dogs or want some good facts.