How to Develop Coherent Paragraphs

One of the most important parts of academic writing is being able to develop coherent paragraphs. The structure of a paragraph gives an outline for your ideas, and it guides your reader through your thought process. When you think "I am going to write my essay for an A" you have to remember some rules that will help you to cope with with challenge.

When doing academic writing, you should use topic sentences for your paragraphs - which means, the main idea of each paragraph should be at the beginning of that paragraph. That is a great way to show your reader your clear reasoning process. Your reader, while reading the topic sentence, will get a basic idea of the whole paragraph. Then expand on that topic sentence in the rest of the paragraph - explain why you have made that statement, give facts or quotes from experts to back it up, and analyze accordingly. You need to demonstrate what you are talking about. There are many ways to do this - you can give definitions, you can give details or examples, you can include some relevant quotations, or you could even talk about a logical sequence of events. Patterns of cause and effect work well in such cases. The coherent development of your paragraph is very important.

The logic behind your paragraph should be crystal clear. Sometimes students tend to use very flowery or fancy language, but a good idea is to keep it as simple as possible - that way you can put forward your point of view in a very effective way. You can include pronouns like 'his' or 'they' to link to specific nouns and keep the focus on your central idea. You can also use certain specialized words to pull your ideas together - like "in other words", or "in addition", or even "moreover" and "more importantly". This helps you state your central theme or thesis statement in bold, explicit words. But if you want to show a change in ideas, or a conflict, then you can use words or phrases like "on the other hand", or "in contrast', or "however".

An important point to note is that your paragraphs should have appropriate length. Don't include one long paragraph after another, as that is difficult and even irritating to read. While editing, if you see very long paragraphs, consider dividing them into two parts to make them more reader-friendly. Of course, it goes without saying that the paragraph breaks should come at logical places. Don't include paragraphs or just two or three lines - they work badly for academic writing, they make them look disjointed.