Paragraph Topic sentence Supporting sentences Concluding sentence Different ways of paragraph development. A topic sentence is the sentence that introduces the main idea in the paragraph. It is ...

In her 1989 book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard describes a fellow writer who was asked by a student if she thought he might become a writer. “Well, do you like sentences?” the fellow writer said.

A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic. This handout breaks the paragraph down into its conceptual and structural components. The conceptual components — ...