(2) Supporting / Developing Sentences
Can you think of some developing sentences for this topic? Smoking cigarettes can be an expensive habit • • • • Cigarettes cost about seventy-five cents. The average smoker smokes two packs a day. The annual expense for this smoker is $547.50. The smoker must also pay for extra cleaning of carpets, furniture, and clothes.
Three essential points: 1. 主题句必须是一个完整的句子 2. 由主题词和主题思想的表述两部分构成 3. 只是一种概括性的陈述而不提供具体的细节
e.g. Gold, a precious metal, is prized for two important characteristics.
Practice
Read each of the following paragraphs. If you find a topic sentence, underline it. If not, write one that sums up the paragraph's message or states its point. Producers make more goods when prices are high, and consumers buy more goods when prices are low. As prices go up, producers make more goods because they can make more money for their goods. As prices go down, consumers buy more goods because of the low prices. This shows us how changes in the prices of goods can cause changes in production and consumption.
Chapter 2
ENGLISH PARAGRAPH WRITING
English Paragraph Writing
2.1 Paragraph Structure 2.2 Paragraph Unity 2.3 Paragraph Coherence 2.4 Sentence Variety
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2.1 Paragraph Structure
The bright child is patient. He can tolerate uncertainty and failure, and will keep trying until he gets an answer. When all his experiments fail, he can even admit to himself and others that for the time being he is not going to get an answer. This may annoy him, but he can wait. Very often, he does not want to be told how to do the problem or solve the puzzle he has struggled with, because he does not want to be cheated out of the chance to figure it out for himself in the future. Not so the dull child. He cannot stand uncertainty or failure. To him, an unanswered question is not a challenge or an opportunity, but a threat. If he can't find the answer quickly, it must be given to him, and quickly; and he must have answers for everything. Such are the children of whom a secondgrade teacher once said, "But my children like to have questions for which there is only one answer." They did; and by a mysterious coincidence, so did she.
Which is a good topic sentence?
• American food is terrible. • American food is tasteless and greasy because Americans use too many canned, frozen, and prepackaged foods and because everything is fried in oil or butter. • American food is tasteless and greasy.
The cost of training new employees is high. In addition to the cost of classroom facilities and instructors, an organization must pay employees a salary to sit in the classroom while they are learning. We have determined that for the company to break even on professional employees (such as engineers or systems analysts), they must stay in the job for which they have been trained for at least one year.
Activity
Identify which is the topic sentence: • Systolic pressure between 140 and 160 indicates borderline hypertension. • In the usual blood pressure reading, the systolic measurement is given first and is the higher of the two. • Systolic pressure is taken when the heart is contracting to pump blood; diastolic pressure is taken when the heart is resting between beats. • Blood pressure measurement has two components: systolic and diastolic. • Normal blood pressure is a systolic measurement of 140, and when the systolic pressure is 160 or higher, then hypertension exists.
One English paragraph usually includes the following three parts: (1) Topic Sentence (2) Supporting / Developing Sentence (3) Concluding Sentence
Paragraph Structure Model
It is perhaps natural that psychologists should awaken only slowly to the possibility that behavioral processes may be directly observed, or that they should only gradually put the older statistical and theoretical techniques in their proper perspective. But it is time to insist that science does not progress by carefully designed steps called "experiments," each of which has a welldefined beginning and end. Science is a continuous and often a disorderly and accidental process. We shall not do the young psychologist any favor if we agree to reconstruct our practices to fit the pattern demanded by current scientific methodology. What the statistician means by the design of experiments is design which yields the kind of data to which his techniques are applicable. He does not mean the behavior of the scientist in his laboratory devising research for his own immediate and possibly inscrutable purposes.