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ELA 5: Writing a Paragraph 101 1131 Views
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Description:
Historians are still debating whether or not the first paragraph was written by a caveman named Krog.* While they're busy debating, you should watch this video to learn how to create a paragraph yourself. *Note: Historians aren’t debating this at all. Like...not even a little bit.
Transcript
- 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.
Full Transcript
- 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…
- 00:58
They’re usually between five and seven sentences in length… [Coop giving details on guidelines for paragraphs]
- 01:01
…they present a main idea or topic sentence, usually right up front…
- 01:04
…they then have between three to five sentences supporting that main idea…
- 01:08
…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]
- 02:03
Then there’s the last sentence…
- 02:05
…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.
- 02:13
But he doesn’t just restate it…
- 02:15
he also draws a conclusion formed from all those supporting sentences…
- 02:19
…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]
- 02:47
disguise yourself in a full-body salmon suit.
- 02:50
But…probably not. [A bear appears behind a rock]
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