Final Activity in ENGL 1013

Your study of the sentence and the paragraph now leads you to the study of the whole composition so that you can write such compositions as part of your schoolwork. The whole compositions may be a report, a reaction paper, a criticism or even a research or term paper. The purposes of the assignments vary, and you should be flexible in your approach to the assignment. First of all, you should know that a composition is any piece of no-fiction writing.

In the earlier chapters, you learned that the easiest and most logical way of structuring your paragraph is to have a topic sentence, support or development sentences, transition devices and, although not absolutely necessary, a concluding sentence. When you make the long composition, you need only to expand these elements so that instead of dealing with sentences, you deal with whole paragraphs. A simplistic way of explaining this would be to compare your topic sentence to the developmental or support paragraphs, the concluding sentences to the concluding paragraph. In between, you still have your transition devices which may be in the form of words, phrases, entire sentences, and even paragraphs.

In informal writing, you need not include a thesis statement in the introductory paragraph because your purpose will probably be to entertain, share, inspire, etc. In formal writing, like the research paper, the introductory paragraph should, for your won convenience, include a thesis statement.