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The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing
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Section 5.3

Paragraph Development

Develop paragraphs in a variety of patterns that reflect your thinking about the material. As you write the topic sentence and its supporting sentences, look for ways to structure your thinking. Where one author advances his or her material by narrating a series of events, another undertakes a physical description and another undertakes an analysis of the topic. These patterns of paragraph development usually emerge in the process of revision. More than one pattern of development may be used in a series of paragraphs.

Here are some important modes of paragraph development:

Exemplification

Narration

Process

Description

Comparison and contrast

Analogy

Cause and effect

Classification and division

Definition

Analysis

Enumeration

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## Paragraph Development ##
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