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For example, newspapers, scientific journals, and fictional essays have somewhat different conventions for the placement of paragraph breaks. A common English usage misconception is that a paragraph has three to five sentences; single-word paragraphs can be seen in some professional writing, and journalists often use single-sentence paragraphs. [7]
Each body paragraph should consist of eight sentences: a topic sentence (T) followed by two "chunks" made up of a sentence presenting a concrete detail (CD) such as a fact, quotation, plot point, or example, followed by two sentences of commentary on that material (CM), and then by a concluding sentence (CS).
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
In expository writing, a topic sentence is a sentence that summarizes the main idea of a paragraph. [1] [2] It is usually the first sentence in a paragraph. Also known as a focus sentence, it encapsulates or organizes an entire paragraph. Although topic sentences may appear anywhere in a paragraph, in academic essays they often appear at the ...
A paragraph can be a single sentence, whether long, short, or middling. [ 30 ] According to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Writing Center's website, "Many students define paragraphs in terms of length: a paragraph is a group of at least five sentences, a paragraph is half a page long, etc."
All the sentences within a paragraph should revolve around the same topic. When the topic changes, a new paragraph should be started. Overly long paragraphs should be split up, as long as the cousin paragraphs keep the idea in focus. One-sentence paragraphs can be emphatic, and should be used sparingly.
The last line of a paragraph continuing on to a new page (highlighted yellow) is a widow (sometimes called an orphan). In typesetting, widows and orphans are single lines of text from a paragraph that dangle at either the beginning or end of a block of text, or form a very short final line at the end of a paragraph. [1]
A good example of this is the List of Benet Academy alumni. (See also Format of the first sentence below.) When the page title is used as the subject of the first sentence, it may appear in a slightly different form, and it may include variations, including plural forms (particularly if they are unusual or confusing) or synonyms. [D] [E]