ParagraphA group of closely related sentences that develop a central Idea.

Requirements of An effective paragraph “

has one topic.- has a topic sentence.

- has supporting sentences that give details or facts about the topic.- has vivid words.

- does not have run-on sentences.- has sentences that make sense and stick to the topic.- has sentences that are in an order that makes sense.

- has sentences that begin in different ways.- is made up of sentences that flow.

- is mechanically correct--spelling, punctuation, capitalization, indentation.

SENTENCES

A sentence is a group of words that are put together to mean something. A sentence is the basic unit of language which expresses a complete thought. It does this by following the grammatical rules of syntax.

A complete sentence has at least a subject and a main verb to state (declare) a complete thought. Short example: Walker walks. A subject is the noun that is doing the main verb. The main verb is the verb that the subject is doing. In English and many other languages, the first word of a written sentence has a capital letter. At the end of the sentence there is a full stop or full poin

Words• a word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with

semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed). A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board, rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (He threw a rock too but he missed).