What is the assignment?
What are you going to write about?
How can you narrow the subject to a topic?
Who is the audience?
What is the purpose of this paragraph?
These questions emphasize the goals of this easy-to-understand guide to writing effective paragraphs. Among these goals are: learning basic sentence and paragraph skills; assimilating and improving the organizational skills needed for writing academic assignments; attaining self-confidence in writing coherent prose.

These goals are fulfilled by:

• Using student samples.
  
• posing a series of questions about invention, organization, and revision.
  
• including a limited grammar and structure review.
  
• offering an opportunity to write about topics of individual interest.
  
• concentrating on actual writing instead of on theories of writing.
  
• approaching the various processes in writing a paragraph step by step.
  
• providing a variety of exercises and assignments that focus essential skills in increasingly complex contexts.