Body Paragraph Development

The term body paragraph refers to any paragraph that appears between the introductory and concluding sections of an essay. If your thesis gives the reader a roadmap to your essay, then body paragraphs should closely follow that map. The reader should be able to predict what follows your introductory paragraph by simply reading the thesis statement.

The body paragraphs present the evidence you have gathered to confirm your thesis. Before you begin to support your thesis in the body, you must find information from a variety of sources that support and give credit to what you are trying to prove.

A good body paragraph should support the claim made in the thesis statement by developing only one key supporting idea. This idea is often referred to as a subclaim.

Some subclaims will take more time to develop than others, so body paragraph length can and often should vary in order to maintain your reader’s interest. When constructing a body paragraph, the most important objectives are to stay on-topic and to fully develop your sub-claim.

When constructing a body paragraph, make sure that you never begin or end with a quotation or a paraphrase. Rather, you should think of a body paragraph as conforming to the following pattern.

Typically, a body paragraph contains three main elements:

• a topic sentence,
• supporting evidence, and
• an explanation of that evidence.

While body paragraphs in some essay assignments (certain summary assignments for example) may not adhere to this pattern exactly, for the most part, following this basic formula will help you to construct a focused and complete body paragraph.

Supporting Evidence

Supporting your ideas effectively is essential to establishing your credibility as a writer, so you should choose your supporting evidence wisely and clearly explain it to your audience. Without support, your argument is not likely to be convincing. Support can be described as the major points you choose to expand on your thesis.

Adding Supporting Evidence to Body Paragraphs

In order to fulfill the requirements of good supporting evidence, the information you choose must meet the following standards:

• Be specific. The main points you make about your thesis and the examples you use to expand on those points need to be specific. Use specific examples to provide the evidence and to build upon your general ideas. These types of examples give your reader something narrow to focus on, and if used properly, they leave little doubt about your claim. General examples, while they convey the necessary information, are not nearly as compelling or useful in writing because they are too obvious and typical.
• Be relevant to the thesis. Primary support is considered strong when it relates directly to the thesis. Primary support should show, explain, or prove your main argument without delving into irrelevant details. When faced with lots of information that could be used to prove your thesis, you may think you need to include it all in your body paragraphs. But effective writers resist the temptation to lose focus. Choose your examples wisely by making sure they directly connect to your thesis.
• Be detailed. Remember that your thesis, while specific, should not be very detailed. The body paragraphs are where you develop the discussion that a thorough essay requires. Using detailed support shows readers that you have considered all the facts and chosen only the most precise details to enhance your point of view.

Types of support might include the following:

• Statistics and data
• Research studies and scholarship
• Hypothetical and real-life examples
• Historical facts
• Analogies
• Precedents
• Laws
• Case histories
• Expert testimonies or opinions
• Eye-witness accounts
• Applicable personal experiences or anecdotes

Varying your means of support will lend further credibility to your essay and help to maintain your reader’s interest. Keep in mind, though, that some types of support are more appropriate for certain academic disciplines than for others.

Direct quotations and paraphrases must be integrated effortlessly and documented appropriately.

Providing Context for Supporting Evidence

Before introducing your supporting evidence, it may occasionally be necessary to provide some context for that information. You should assume that your audience has not read your source texts in their entirety, if at all, so including some background or connecting material between your topic sentence and supporting evidence is frequently essential.

The information contained in your evidence selection might need to be introduced, explained, or defined so that your supporting evidence is perfectly clear to an audience unfamiliar with the source material. For example, your supporting evidence might contain a reference to a concept or term that is not explained or defined in the excerpt or elsewhere in your essay. In this instance, you would need to provide some clarification for your audience. Anticipating your audience is particularly important when incorporating supporting evidence into your essay.

Now that we have a good idea what it means to develop support for the main ideas of your paragraphs, let’s talk about how to make sure that those supporting details are solid and convincing.

Good vs. Weak Support

When you’re developing paragraphs, you should already have a plan for your essay, at least at the most basic level. You know what your topic is, you have a working thesis, and you have at least a couple of supporting ideas in mind that will further develop and support your thesis. You need to make sure that the support that you develop for these ideas is solid. Understanding and appealing to your audience can also be helpful in determining what your readers will consider good support and what they’ll consider to be weak. Here are some tips on what to strive for and what to avoid when it comes to supporting evidence.

Good Support:

• is relevant and focused (sticks to the point)
• is well developed
• provides sufficient detail
• is vivid and descriptive
• is well organized
• is coherent and consistent
• highlights key terms and ideas

Weak Support:

• lacks a clear connection to the point that it’s meant to support
• lacks development
• lacks detail or gives too much detail
• is vague and imprecise
• lacks organization
• seems disjointed (ideas don’t clearly relate to each other)
• lacks emphasis of key terms and ideas

Body Paragraph Development

Developing a paragraph can be a difficult task for many students. They usually approach the task with certain ideas firmly in mind, most notably that a paragraph is 5-6 sentences and the paragraph is about what they are talking about, which isn’t necessarily a bad place to start. But when pushed to explain more specifically what constitutes a good paragraph or how to present the information they will discuss, problems begin to emerge. If you are struggling to craft a fully developed paragraph, you might find the following step-by step approach helpful.

Perhaps the easiest way to think about a “fully developed” paragraph is to think of writing each paragraph in 6 different steps rather than a certain amount of sentences.  These steps can be helpful in not only understanding the criteria needed in a paragraph or how they connect to one another to create a conversation in your paper but also to ensure that your audience understands your purpose in presenting this paragraph.

Focusing on the number of sentences may limit how you express the idea being discussed. However, this doesn’t mean that the information can be presented without a plan in mind; you should begin with understanding what a paragraph needs to “be” and “do.”

Goals of the Paragraph: What it should “be”

While there is no “right way” to develop a paragraph, there are certain criteria that an academic paragraph should work to be:

• Unified: Every sentence presented works to explain the main idea for the paragraph.
• Coherent: You present the information in a logical order that allows the audience to understand your purpose.
• Developed: To achieve this, you must provide enough information so that the audience has a clear understanding of the main idea expressed in the topic sentence.

Developing the Paragraph: Creating what it should “do”

1. Establish a Main Idea 

It is important to begin a paragraph with a clear, concise, and limited topic sentence. Many problems with unity and coherency begin with a faulty or vague topic sentence. Being able to recognize the parts of a topic sentence will help you maintain a unified paragraph. If we break a basic topic sentence down, there are two distinct parts:

The topic being discussed + Your approach to the topic

Too often, students focus on the wrong part of the topic sentence. They believe that the topic or subject (or sub-claim) is the most important part of the sentence since “that is what I am talking about.” This is where the trouble with unity begins. There are many ways to discuss the topic, so conceivably any information related to that topic could end up in the paragraph. Ultimately, the unity breaks down and the reader will not understand the significance of your idea because the information may be having two different conversations, instead of one.

When there are two different approaches to the same sub-claim, the conversation jumps from one to another, dissolving any unity to the paragraph. However, there is only one way to discuss your approach related to the sub-claim, and it is through that lens that we look at all the information presented in the paragraph and how we determine if the information belongs in the paragraph or not.

2. Provide an Explanation

This step may be a bit of a trap.  Many students are often tempted to reach for their research and begin providing support for the main idea. However, this isn’t always the best option. Many times when students do this, they are using their research/ support to do the thinking for them. Before reaching for the research, students should provide an explanation regarding their topic sentence.

You can also think of this section as a link between the topic sentence and supporting evidence where you provide any necessary contextual information for the evidence.

The main focus of any paragraph should be what you have to say. If you are putting forth this idea in support of your thesis, the audience is going to want to know what you think about it–what is important or significant about this main idea. They may not fully understand the topic sentence the way you intend them to, so explain your reasoning to the reader.

3. Provide Support/Evidence

Now that your audience should have a better understanding of the main idea/ topic, you are ready to provide support/ evidence. You want to be very selective when deciding what textual support to include in the paragraph. Not all evidence is the same, and not all evidence achieves the same goals. The textual support should help to reinforce or illustrate more about your topic sentence for the reader, helping them understand it in a more complete way. Whether your support takes the form of a direct quote or a paraphrase, it must be properly embedded and documented.

4. Interpret the Support/Evidence

This is often one of the more difficult aspects for students, and a step in the development that they overlook. No matter how clear you think the textual support provided is, it does not speak for itself. The reason is that the audience may not understand how you intend them to interpret the information, and how that relates back to supporting the main idea of the paragraph. When you explain how this information is relevant to your topic sentence, why it is important or significant, you need to offer insight to that information.

Don’t simply follow up your support with a single sentence that begins with a phrase like “This proves” or “Meaning” and then restate what the evidence said. Know why you included this information and why it is important to your paragraph. You need to connect the dots for your reader, so they see exactly how that information is providing support, and helping your main idea.

The bulk of the information should be coming from you, not your sources. Your audience wants to know what it is that you think, your perspective on the idea, and how you intended to link it back to the thesis.

5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4, if necessary

If you have more than one piece of textual support that you want to include, you need to repeat the two previous steps to fully develop your paragraph. You will want to vary your evidence. If you use statistics, then you may want to include expert testimony. If the first piece of evidence focuses on logic, you want to tap into one of the other appeals such as pathos to bring a full view of the issue to your reader. However, you don’t want to keep simply repeating this sequence: evidence should be used to help achieve your purpose, not to fill space.

6. Connect to the thesis statement

When you feel that your audience has a clear understanding of your idea and its significance to your thesis, you can wrap up the paragraph in different ways:

• • emphasize the importance of understanding the idea,
  • make a connection to previous and/or forthcoming ideas
  • overall ensure that the information is being related directly back to the main purpose of the essay as defined in your thesis statement.

While this is not the only way to write a paragraph, it can be a helpful guide and/or model when you need a structure to begin shaping and organizing your ideas, to help you compose a unified, coherent, well-developed paragraph.

Breaking, Combining, or Beginning New Paragraphs

Like sentence length, paragraph length varies. There is no single ideal length for “the perfect paragraph.”  There are some general guidelines, however. Some writing handbooks or resources suggest that a paragraph should be at least three or four sentences; others suggest that 100 to 200 words is a good target to shoot for. In academic writing, paragraphs tend to be longer, while in less formal or less complex writing, such as in a newspaper, paragraphs tend to be much shorter. Two-thirds to three-fourths of a page is usually a good target length for paragraphs at your current level of college writing. If your readers can’t see a paragraph break on the page, they might wonder if the paragraph is ever going to end or they might lose interest.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that the amount of space needed to develop one idea will likely be different than the amount of space needed to develop another. So when is a paragraph complete? The answer is, when it’s fully developed. The guidelines above for providing good support should help.

Some signals that it’s time to end a paragraph and start a new one include:

• You’re ready to begin developing a new idea
• You want to emphasize a point by setting it apart
• You’re getting ready to continue discussing the same idea but in a different way (e.g. shifting from comparison to contrast)
• You notice that your current paragraph is getting too long (more than three-fourths of a page or so), and you think your writers will need a visual break

Some signals that you may want to combine paragraphs include:

• You notice that some of your paragraphs appear to be short and choppy
• You have multiple paragraphs on the same topic
• You have undeveloped material that needs to be united under a clear topic

Finally, paragraph number is a lot like paragraph length. You may have been asked in the past to write a five-paragraph essay. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a five-paragraph essay, but just like sentence length and paragraph length, the number of paragraphs in an essay depends upon what’s needed to get the job done. There’s really no way to know that until you start writing. So try not to worry too much about the proper length and number of things. Just start writing and see where the essay and the paragraphs take you. There will be plenty of time to sort out the organization in the revision process. You’re not trying to fit pegs into holes here. You’re letting your ideas unfold. Give yourself—and them—the space to let that happen.

Continue Reading: 9.6 Introductory and Concluding Paragraphs