Body Paragraphs

English teachers frequently read underdeveloped and/or overinterpreted body paragraphs at the beginning of each school year, as students struggle to remind themselves of the discipline of analytical writing. If you're trying to develop a written argument, you need:

• Strong topic sentences
• Connected pieces of evidence
• Specific examination of quotes

Every body paragraph must contain evidence, which, as you know in essays of literary analysis, means quotes. But one piece of evidence isn't enough; if you have only one quote in a paragraph, it means that all the rest of the words is mere interpretation of a quote. To effectively argue an idea, remember these formulae:

fact = fact

fact + fact = idea

The best essays feature excellent quote choices. These quotes allow you to examine the specific language of the text when you write the interpretive parts of your body paragraphs. Look at the comments on these model paragraphs to see what specific examination looks like.

So, to summarize the body paragraphs portion of the lesson, you ultimately end up with a development that looks, at minimum, like this.

• Topic sentence
• Set-up for first piece of evidence
• Quote
• Explanation of way evidence relates to topic sentence idea; relationship to next piece of evidence
• Set-up for next piece of evidence
• Quote
• Developing explanation of way pieces of evidence fit together to advance topic sentence idea

This may sound overly prescriptive, but your teachers are not reading your essays with a checklist about the number of sentences you have in your paragraphs. Nor should you think about these bullets as a checklist. This simply represents a breakdown of what is contained in paragraphs that are beginning to use evidence well.