Composition Interventions

This resource describes the elements of a paragraph.

Explains the key processes and strategies for supporting students' paragraph writing

Framed paragraphs are pre-writing tools that help students write well-developed paragraphs. They are skeleton formats containing information about the main ideas and transition words that guide the organization and the development of supportive details. Framed paragraphs offer a structure for students to use as they begin to write paragraphs and essays.

The “paragraph hamburger” is a writing organizer that visually outlines the key components of a paragraph. Topic sentence, detail sentences, and a closing sentence are the main elements of a good paragraph, and each one forms a different “piece” of the hamburger.

This chapter in The Writing Rope discusses how to teach paragraph skills to writers.

After a brief review of paragraphing conventions in dialogue, students select a piece of their own writing that contains dialogue. They go through the piece, highlighting the speech of each character in a different color. They then go through the piece again looking for and correcting "character clashes" that occur when two speakers are highlighted in the same paragraph.