ShmoopTube

00:04

[Coop and Dino singing]

00:13

“Paragraph”…that must be some kind of…graph, right?

00:16

With diagonal lines…maybe some pretty, colored bars? [A line and a bar graph on a whiteboard]

00:20

No? It’s not a graph at all? Ugh. Way to go, English.

00:25

A paragraph…in short… is a small, self-contained unit of writing.

00:29

We’re not talking a little love note on a napkin… [A woman reading a love note on a napkin]

00:32

…but a portion of writing that consists of more than one sentence…

00:37

…and is used to separate ideas in a longer piece of writing. [A letter on a piece of paper stuck on a fridge]

00:40

So, you know…your eyes don’t bug out of your head trying to look at something like this…

00:45

Non-fiction paragraphs are usually a little more structured than fiction ones. [A selection of books on a shelf]

00:49

Those fiction writers…they like to make up their own rules sometimes.

00:53

But most paragraphs you’ll come across follow some tried-and-true guidelines…

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They’re usually between five and seven sentences in length… [Coop giving details on guidelines for paragraphs]

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…they present a main idea or topic sentence, usually right up front…

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…they then have between three to five sentences supporting that main idea…

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…and, finally, a concluding sentence that wraps everything up nicely and neatly, with

01:13

a pretty little bow on top. [A hand places a bow on Coops chalkboard]

01:15

For instance, here’s a piece of writing that we… grudgingly admit would be considered a paragraph:

01:20

“I would not like to get eaten by a bear. It would be painful, for bears have very large claws.

01:26

Bears also have very large teeth. It would also make my mother sad if I were eaten by a bear.

01:31

Therefore, I have started avoiding areas with bears in order to avoid being eaten.”

01:36

Okay, so…probably not going to win the Newberry Medal, but… at least it ticks all the right boxes. [A man on stage rejected for a Newberry Medal award]

01:43

In this example, the first sentence delivers the topic we’ll be focusing on for the rest

01:47

of the paragraph:

01:48

…the possibility of being eaten by a bear.

01:50

That concept definitely has something to do with…everything else in the paragraph… [Paragraph highlighted yellow in a notebook]

01:55

…and all the lines that follow serve to support the idea that that would be...

01:59

uh…well, it would be a bad thing. [A bear appears]

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Then there’s the last sentence…

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…where the author kicks things off with a pretty clear-cut “therefore”…

02:09

…and then wraps things up by restating the original idea of the paragraph.

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But he doesn’t just restate it…

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he also draws a conclusion formed from all those supporting sentences…

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…in this case, that avoiding bear hang-outs would probably be a smart thing to do.

02:24

Remember, though… usually a paragraph is followed by…many more paragraphs. [A paragraph joined to more paragraphs]

02:28

So it could be that the paragraphs that follow this one…go into even more detail about

02:33

why getting eaten by a bear is bad, why you should steer clear of them, et cetera.

02:38

So if we were to read on…we should be able to see a flow from this paragraph to the next one.

02:44

Maybe in the next paragraph…we’ll learn that the best way to avoid detection is to [A man wearing a full-body salmon suit in the woods]

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disguise yourself in a full-body salmon suit.

02:50

But…probably not. [A bear appears behind a rock]

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