The Paragraph as an Essay in Miniature

In a short humanities paper, such as a brief argumentative essay in English or history, it is helpful to consider a model of the paragraph as an essay in miniature. When you have only five or six paragraphs in which to make your point, your arguments need to be up front, clearly stated, well supported, and smoothly connected. Each paragraph needs to be purposefully and concisely structured. Just as the thesis statement gives focus and direction to the essay as a whole, so the argumentative paragraph begins with a topic sentence that states the main idea for that particular paragraph. A paragraph that begins with a deliberate, strong topic sentence that expresses the main point under discussion is the best model for a short argumentative essay.

This way of structuring a paragraph follows the structural logic of the essay as a whole, stating its topic clearly at the beginning, supporting the particular argument with evidence and analysis, and concluding by reiterating the main idea of the paragraph or by relating the given topic to the concerns of the essay in general. When a paragraph is constructed like a miniature essay, it can stand alone, waiting to be joined to other mini-essay chunks by suitable connective words and phrases (see chart) as your essay argument or discussion develops.

The paragraph on the right from Jonathan Vance's celebrated war history Death So Noble illustrates this principle of paragraph structure. The topic sentence is given in bold, and the concluding statement in italic.

       The notion of the Golden Summer has persisted in the Canadian consciousness for a variety of reasons. In historiographical terms, the prosperity of the Laurier years was carried forward to 1914 simply to compartmentalize the past more efficiently. That year was so obviously a watershed that it seemed inconvenient to place another turning point at 1912, when the Laurier boom actually began to tail off. On another level, to Canadians looking back at 1914 after the tragedy of war, the disappointment of the peace, and the dislocation of the Depression, the last summer of peace must have appeared as a golden age, if only in contrast to what followed it. The season of bounty, however, was also essential to Canada's myth of the war; it was one of the props on which the entire edifice rested. The Golden Summer was the only milieu in which the idealized version of the Canadian soldier could exist.