The Unit of Construction

The adroit writer knows his building blocks.  The building blocks to every piece of writing is the paragraph.  In poetry, we call it the stanza.  In narrative, informative and persuasive writing it is basically known as the paragraph:  the inevitable building block we all come to when we build our written edifices.  Strunk and White were the first to note in The Elements of Style that this was the lean, crisp, incisive structural piece that all good writing danced upon.  A good rule of thumb is you should be able to create as many sentences in your paragraphs as the grade you've reached (if you're in 3rd grade, 3 sentence paragraphs; 5 for 5th; etc.).  Jane Schaeffer discovered that the essays that best helped teenagers get into the colleges of their choice had the most Concrete Details (CD) coupled with comments on said CDs.  Concrete Details are facts, incidences, examples, pieces of evidence coughed up in sentences.  For every topic sentence of a paragraph, she found the good writers could come up with 3 to 4 concrete details and ten to twelve comments per CD.  Paragraphs morph into elastic blocks when used for different purposes.  For poetry, they are stanzas of description.  For informative writing, they are receptacles of facts.  For Narrative writing, they are purveyors of actions, conversations and incidences.  For persuasive essays, they are cogent arguments.  The paragraph is the play-dough we all need to become good at modeling.