Drafting

Drafting Stand-Alone Paragraphs

Sometimes, you might be assigned to write just a single paragraph, not an entire essay. In this case, your topic sentence and thesis are the same thing. When planning, drafting, and revising a stand-alone paragraph, you still have to consider basic standards for effective writing. Here is a checklist for completing the single-paragraph assignment.

CHECKLIST: WRITING A STAND-ALONE PARAGRAPH

Determine your purpose: to inform, to entertain, or to persuade.
Consider your audience: Ask yourself questions about your readers’ knowledge of and attitudes about your subject.
Use a prewriting strategy (freewriting, clustering) to narrow your subject.
Write a topic sentence that states the main point of your paragraph.
Based on what you considered while prewriting, choose the details, examples, and evidence that best support your topic sentence.
Consider how you will organize these supporting ideas so that they clearly build on one another.
- Arrange these ideas in a brief informal outline of your paragraph.
- Plan a paragraph that is clearly structured. In college writing, a paragraph often has the following parts:
  - a topic sentence that states the main point of your paragraph a body made up of several sentences that support, explain, or prove your topic sentence
  - a concluding sentence that takes readers back to the main idea of the paragraph
Write a draft of your paragraph based on your planning.
Revise your paragraph. Consider what steps you might take to improve it, and ask for feedback from your instructor and your peers.
Edit your paragraph by eliminating errors in grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and word use.

Consider how the following paragraph, written as part of an economics exam, reflects some of the steps in the checklist.

EXAMPLE ASSIGNMENT:

Explain the difference between a country’s gross national product (GNP) and its gross domestic product (GDP).

EXAMPLE PARAGRAPH RESPONSE:

Though they are both important indicators of a country’s economic wellbeing, GNP and GDP are not the same. The GNP is the total market value of all goods and services produced by a country’s labor force and capital anywhere in the world. For example, the market value of clothing produced and sold by The Gap, regardless of store and factory location, would figure into the United States’ GNP. The GNP would include profits earned from Canadian and European stores, as well as from stores in places like Boston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The GDP, on the other hand, is the total market value of goods and services produced by a country’s labor force and capital within a country’s borders. Profits earned by The Gap in places other than the United States would not count toward the country’s GDP. Each of these figures is a separate but equally valuable way to measure a country’s economic health.

As the underlined topic sentence indicates, the paragraph will focus on differences between GNP and GDP, and every sentence afterward explains at least one of these two concepts. Because this is a complex paragraph with technical information, the paragraph ends by reminding us of the overall point.