Paragraph Development: A Guide For Students Of English As A Second Language, by Martin Arnaudet

As someone who has written essays on a near-daily basis for years, and as a native speaker and writer of English who regularly conducts paragraph development with considerable flair and distinctive style, I am not the target audience for a book such as this one. As it happens, though, I have long known people whose situation has led them to need a book like this in order to help with one of the most difficult tasks in the English language, and that is to take the untamable grammar of English sentences and the immense fecundity of English vocabulary and to turn their own compositional skills loose on creating coherent and creative paragraphs that serve the technical tasks of answering formulaic questions in a striking and original way that simultaneously provide evidence of one’s own skills as a writer. This is a complex and difficult task, and it requires attention on all levels, and this particular book does a good job at framing this task so that someone who has at least an intermediate level of English vocabulary and grammar can profit from knowing how it is to show their skills in the English language to the best effect when engaged in passing the writing section of exams or writing entrance essays or even essays in coursework. This is a task that more accomplished writers may take for granted and thus be unable to effectively explain to those who are learning it.

As one might expect from a book that is engaged in the task of teaching a very particular set of skill to students, this book is structured in a very systematic fashion on all levels. Overall, the book is almost 200 pages of material, divided largely into three parts, which comprise eight chapters, of which the middle part of the material–paragraph development–is both the title of the work and its most predominant element. After a forward and preface, this book begins its main contents with a discussion of topic sentences (1). If one is to develop paragraphs effectively, obviously these paragraphs must be controlled and defined properly through one’s choice of a topic sentence. The next several chapters of the book then demonstrate how one adds additional sentences to support the topic sentence through such means as providing examples, details, anecdotes, facts, and statistics (2), enumeration (3), with special attention given to process and chronology (4), cause and effect (5), comparison and contrast (6), and definition (7). The last chapter of the book then expands on the paragraph itself and points out how entire essays may be controlled by an effectively written introduction that contains a controlling statement (what I learned as the specific purpose statement or thesis statement in my own compositional learning) which governs the scope of the entire essay as a whole (8). The book then concludes with an index.

While this book could merely have been a useful and functional book, overall this book was enjoyable as a pleasure reading apart from its usefulness to students. One of the striking elements of this book is the way in which its structure and order reinforces its material on every level. Not only is the material of the book about paragraph development set in an overall theme of compositional writing, but the book’s individual chapters demonstrate this theme as well, beginning with overall lessons, often explained in a table, then providing the student with an opportunity to apply these lessons through correcting or arranging already-written material on various topics, and finally giving the student the chance to learn these skills in answering prompts that provide the student with the chance to write the sort of material that they have been reading and editing. On top of this, the material of this book is frequently interesting in its own right, containing materials that deal with the differences between British and American English, explain important aspects of American character as well aspects of history and culture, and which instruct the reader not only on how to effectively develop paragraphs and create essays in English but also on the nature of the tenor of life in English-speaking countries. Although the book is as old as I am, its materials are still useful, even if the specific essay topics that students would be asked to write in the contemporary period were not in the imagination of the writers of the early 1980s.