Writing Effectively at The World Health Organization

Ordering ideas into paragraphs

The main organizational unit for your ideas is the paragraph. Developing paragraphs in any kind of document means you have shifted your efforts from planning to drafting.

But what is a paragraph? If you remember only one thing about paragraphs, let it be this: a well-written paragraph supports a single main idea. To use our own terminology, a paragraph contains a single main message. Remember this as you compose and review your paragraphs. A paragraph is effective because it supports a single main idea, not because it has a particular number of words or sentences.

Good paragraphs use three important techniques to guide the reader. You will explore each of these techniques in more detail in this section of the module.

Look for the pattern of organization in example 1, parallel structure in example 2, and the topic sentence in example 3; then move your cursor over the examples to view our comments.

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