RUNNING HEAD: Chapter 1.

Paragraph Structure 1

Chapter 1. Paragraph Structure

Alice Oshima in Chapter 1 from the book, Writing Academic English, expresses ideas of

how to write an academic paragraph regarding its structure and supporting details. Firstly,

Oshima states that “A paragraph is a group of related sentences that discuss one main

idea.”(Oshima, 2006) ……..Secondly, Oshima explains the structure of a paragraph, such as the

topic sentence, supporting sentences and concluding sentence, giving examples and practice

exercises to help us to have a better understanding of the ideas explained before. Thirdly,

Oshima discusses the importance of following some set of rules when using supporting details in

order to give strength to our ideas and opinions about a specific writing topic. Which I found

very interesting due to the fact that one of the biggest problems we have as novice writers is that

we often fail to support our ideas properly.

For this reason I think it´s very important to know and to apply those concepts while

writing a paragraph; for example, to be aware which tense is used to reporting verbs that may

cause changes in some verbs, pronouns, and time expressions in an indirect quotation. That

probably has happened in several of my writings, so I have to pay more attention to that. Another

interesting rule that I wasn´t aware of, was the correctly use of punctuation of direct quotations

and their exceptions. In that order, I would have to start following those concepts and rules in

order to improve my writing skills, also to start using square brackets, single quotations and

ellipsis, which I had not known when or where to use them when doing quotations. Finally, I

really enjoyed solving the exercises proposed by the text, despite of the time it took me to solve

them, I could understand better how to make writing more thorough, convincing and joyful.