Unit by unit, your paragraphs together develop your paper s thesis. In other words, the central ideas of each of your paragraphs, in sequence, represent an outline of your argument.
Good paragraphs are unified and coherent.
You ll find that unified paragraphs often develop a topic sentence that announces the paragraph s theme or controlling idea. They re maddeningly dogmatic when they meet every criticism with a reference to one of their sacred texts, as if the great Sigmund had an answer for every problem in the modern world. In this example the topic sentence is the first sentence in the paragraph. Most of the time it s reassuring to your reader to find it there. Occasionally you may want to locate your topic sentence in the middle of the paragraph, or perhaps to build up to it at the end.