In which I attempt to advance my English writing skills from poor to mediocre.
How do you get thoughts to flow from paragraph to paragraph?
Published on May 27, 2004 By dreamtime iliaster In Misc
I've never understood paragraphs. When I was in elementary school, I never used them, and it didn't seem to be a big deal. From middle school through high school, we wrote the same five paragraph essay over and over, varying the filler. That was good training for writing five paragraph essays, but not much else. In college I managed to avoid writing classes altogether. Now, all of my writing is disjointed. You could remove a single paragraph from one of my "essays", and it would flow just as well. The removed paragraph could stand alone and not be unintelligible. Surely this can't be how it's supposed to work. I have the feeling you get when you're sure you've misspelled a word, but every alternate spelling you try looks wrong too. I know I can't be writing well, but I have no idea how to go about fixing it.
Comments
on May 27, 2004
You avoided writing classes in highschool? Why on earth would you do that?

Paragraphs help the reader segway from one idea to another. They help you organize your writing, because rather than just free-flow'n (although some enjoy this), they force you to separate ideas and develope them thoroughly.

Just try it. Practice makes perfect. Paragraphs aren't important, really, it's learning how to organize your thoughts so that they fit into paragraphs.

Trinitie
on May 27, 2004
excuse me, avoided writing classes in college. I'm an idiot.

Trinitie
on May 27, 2004
I was too busy taking golf to take writing

Organizing my thoughts. Yikes. That sounds a lot harder than organizing my desk, and I can't even do that.