Unit 4 · Topic 4.7

4.7 Body paragraphs that hold together

A strong body paragraph opens with a topic sentence tied to your thesis, then develops it with evidence and commentary. Transitions, repeated key words, clear pronouns and parallel structure hold each paragraph, and the whole essay, together. This is how your line of reasoning becomes easy to follow.

Key terms

topic sentence
body paragraph
coherence
transition
parallel structure

What a body paragraph does

Each body paragraph develops one claim that supports your thesis. It opens with a topic sentence stating that claim, brings in evidence, explains the evidence with commentary and connects back to the thesis. The paragraph should feel like a unit: every sentence serves its claim.

Coherence at three levels

Coherence means your ideas link logically so the reader never has to guess how one thought connects to the next. It works at three levels:

In a sentence: each part follows from the part before it.
In a paragraph: every sentence picks up where the last one left off.
In an essay: every paragraph takes the argument a step further.

Tools for coherence

Choose transitions that show the actual relationship. "Also" adds; "however" contrasts; "therefore" shows a result; "this suggests" moves from evidence to interpretation. Using "also" everywhere hides your logic.

Tool	What it does	Example
Transitions	Show the relationship between ideas	however, as a result, similarly, even so, at first ... later
Repetition of key words	Keeps the main idea in view	Repeating "silence" across a paragraph about a character's silence
Synonyms	Repeat the idea without boring the reader	"silence," then "refusal to speak," then "her quiet"
Pronoun reference	Links sentences, if the pronoun is clear	"Sylvia hesitates. Her hesitation..."
Parallel structure	Shows that ideas are equal or connected	"She gives up the money, the friendship and the attention."

Watch your pronouns

Vague pronouns are a common coherence problem. If you write "This shows that she is brave," make sure "this" clearly points to one thing. Often it's better to name it: "This silence shows..."

Coherence across the essay

Paragraphs need to link, too. The first sentence of a new paragraph can point back to the last one and forward to the new claim: "Sylvia's silence protects the heron, but it also changes how she sees the hunter." That one sentence shows the reader how the two paragraphs connect. Over a whole essay, these links turn a set of separate observations into a line of reasoning that builds.

Worked examples

Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.

Example 1
Revising a paragraph for coherence
Here's a draft body paragraph about Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron" (1886), written for this practice set: "Sylvia doesn't tell the hunter. The hunter offered ten dollars. Sylvia is poor. The narrator asks questions. It shows that it is a hard choice. She thinks about the heron. She doesn't speak." Revise it into a coherent paragraph with a clear topic sentence, transitions and commentary. (In the story, the narrator asks whether Sylvia must "thrust it aside for a bird's sake.")
Show the solutionHide the solution
1. Step 1: Diagnose the problems. There's no topic sentence; the sentences don't connect; "It shows that it" has unclear pronouns; there's no quotation or commentary.
2. Step 2: Write a topic sentence that states a claim tied to a thesis about Sylvia's values.
3. Step 3: Order the evidence logically: first the pressure to speak, then the narrator's question, then her final silence.
4. Step 4: Add transitions that show relationships (although, yet, because), repeat the key idea ("silence") and replace vague pronouns with nouns.
Answer: Revised paragraph: Sylvia's silence is meaningful because Jewett makes the cost of it so clear. The hunter has offered ten dollars, a large sum for a girl who lives in poverty with her grandmother, so speaking would bring her family real help. Even the narrator seems to argue for speaking, asking whether Sylvia must "thrust it aside for a bird's sake." Yet that question also shows how unequal the choice looks to outsiders: money and approval on one side, only "a bird" on the other. When Sylvia still refuses to speak, her silence becomes an active choice, not a failure of nerve. Because she chooses the heron despite everything pulling her the other way, her silence reveals how deeply she values the wild world she belongs to. (What changed: a topic sentence that makes a claim; transitions such as "so," "Even," "Yet," "When" and "Because"; the key word "silence" repeated; vague "it" replaced with nouns; a quotation with commentary.)

Common mistakes

Starting a body paragraph with a quotation or a plot fact instead of a claim.
Using "also" or "another example is" to connect every idea. Use transitions that show the real relationship.
Leaving pronouns like "this" or "it" pointing to nothing clear.
Letting a paragraph wander into a second claim. Start a new paragraph for a new claim.

On the exam

Readers reward a clear line of reasoning. Topic sentences that each advance the thesis make your reasoning visible, which helps you reach the top of the evidence-and-commentary row.
Leave a minute at the end of each essay to scan your topic sentences. Together they should read like an outline of your argument.

Connected topics

Videos

How to Write a Body Paragraph for Literary Analysis Essays (Full Paragraph Included)
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Body PARAGRAPHING for AP LIT QUESTION 2 (Template Included!)
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Make Your Writing Flow | Ideas: Cohesion, Coherence, and Organization
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How to Write Strong Essay Body Paragraphs – with REAL Example | Scribbr 🎓
ScribbrWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
How to Transition Between Paragraphs and Sentences: Transition words with examples
Tech meets Rhet: English Composition ResourcesWatch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Check yourself

4 questions on 4.7 Body paragraphs that hold together. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.

“Jose, come here.” Laura caught hold of her sister’s sleeve and dragged her through the kitchen to the other side of the green baize door. There she paused and leaned against it. “Jose!” she said, horrified, “however are we going to stop everything?”

“Stop everything, Laura!” cried Jose in astonishment. “What do you mean?”

“Stop the garden-party, of course.” Why did Jose pretend?

But Jose was still more amazed. “Stop the garden-party? My dear Laura, don’t be so absurd. Of course we can’t do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don’t be so extravagant.”

“But we can’t possibly have a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate.”

That really was extravagant, for the little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house. A broad road ran between. True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans’ chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.

“And just think of what the band would sound like to that poor woman,” said Laura.

“Oh, Laura!” Jose began to be seriously annoyed. “If you’re going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you’ll lead a very strenuous life. I’m every bit as sorry about it as you. I feel just as sympathetic.” Her eyes hardened. She looked at her sister just as she used to when they were little and fighting together. “You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental,” she said softly.

“Drunk! Who said he was drunk?” Laura turned furiously on Jose. She said, just as they had used to say on those occasions, “I’m going straight up to tell mother.”

“Do, dear,” cooed Jose.

“Mother, can I come into your room?” Laura turned the big glass door-knob.

“Of course, child. Why, what’s the matter? What’s given you such a colour?” And Mrs. Sheridan turned round from her dressing-table. She was trying on a new hat.

“Mother, a man’s been killed,” began Laura.

“Not in the garden?” interrupted her mother.

“No, no!”

“Oh, what a fright you gave me!” Mrs. Sheridan sighed with relief, and took off the big hat and held it on her knees.

“But listen, mother,” said Laura. Breathless, half-choking, she told the dreadful story. “Of course, we can’t have our party, can we?” she pleaded. “The band and everybody arriving. They’d hear us, mother; they’re nearly neighbours!”

To Laura’s astonishment her mother behaved just like Jose; it was harder to bear because she seemed amused. She refused to take Laura seriously.

“But, my dear child, use your common sense. It’s only by accident we’ve heard of it. If some one had died there normally—and I can’t understand how they keep alive in those poky little holes—we should still be having our party, shouldn’t we?”

Laura had to say “yes” to that, but she felt it was all wrong. She sat down on her mother’s sofa and pinched the cushion frill.

“Mother, isn’t it terribly heartless of us?” she asked.

“Darling!” Mrs. Sheridan got up and came over to her, carrying the hat. Before Laura could stop her she had popped it on. “My child!” said her mother, “the hat is yours. It’s made for you. It’s much too young for me. I have never seen you look such a picture. Look at yourself!” And she held up her hand-mirror.

“But, mother,” Laura began again. She couldn’t look at herself; she turned aside.

Katherine Mansfield, “The Garden Party” (1922), from The Garden Party, and Other Stories (1922)

Question 1 of 4

A student is writing a paragraph about how the passage portrays the Sheridan family's attitude toward the poor. Which topic sentence would best begin the paragraph?

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:

“He is in Melbourne now.”

She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her. Of course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.

“Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?”

“Look lively, Miss Hill, please.”

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.

But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages—seven shillings—and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad of a Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing, holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

James Joyce, “Eveline,” from Dubliners (1914)

Question 2 of 4

A student claims that Eveline's longing for respect is shaped by what she has seen happen to the women around her. Which detail from the passage best supports this claim?

Little Mrs. Sommers one day found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars. It seemed to her a very large amount of money, and the way in which it stuffed and bulged her worn old porte-monnaie gave her a feeling of importance such as she had not enjoyed for years.

The question of investment was one that occupied her greatly. For a day or two she walked about apparently in a dreamy state, but really absorbed in speculation and calculation. She did not wish to act hastily, to do anything she might afterward regret. But it was during the still hours of the night when she lay awake revolving plans in her mind that she seemed to see her way clearly toward a proper and judicious use of the money.

A dollar or two should be added to the price usually paid for Janie’s shoes, which would insure their lasting an appreciable time longer than they usually did. She would buy so and so many yards of percale for new shirt waists for the boys and Janie and Mag. She had intended to make the old ones do by skilful patching. Mag should have another gown. She had seen some beautiful patterns, veritable bargains in the shop windows. And still there would be left enough for new stockings—two pairs apiece—and what darning that would save for a while! She would get caps for the boys and sailor-hats for the girls. The vision of her little brood looking fresh and dainty and new for once in their lives excited her and made her restless and wakeful with anticipation.

The neighbors sometimes talked of certain “better days” that little Mrs. Sommers had known before she had ever thought of being Mrs. Sommers. She herself indulged in no such morbid retrospection. She had no time—no second of time to devote to the past. The needs of the present absorbed her every faculty. A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily to-morrow never comes.

Mrs. Sommers was one who knew the value of bargains; who could stand for hours making her way inch by inch toward the desired object that was selling below cost. She could elbow her way if need be; she had learned to clutch a piece of goods and hold it and stick to it with persistence and determination till her turn came to be served, no matter when it came.

But that day she was a little faint and tired. She had swallowed a light luncheon—no! when she came to think of it, between getting the children fed and the place righted, and preparing herself for the shopping bout, she had actually forgotten to eat any luncheon at all!

She sat herself upon a revolving stool before a counter that was comparatively deserted, trying to gather strength and courage to charge through an eager multitude that was besieging breastworks of shirting and figured lawn. An all-gone limp feeling had come over her and she rested her hand aimlessly upon the counter. She wore no gloves. By degrees she grew aware that her hand had encountered something very soothing, very pleasant to touch. She looked down to see that her hand lay upon a pile of silk stockings. A placard near by announced that they had been reduced in price from two dollars and fifty cents to one dollar and ninety-eight cents; and a young girl who stood behind the counter asked her if she wished to examine their line of silk hosiery. She smiled, just as if she had been asked to inspect a tiara of diamonds with the ultimate view of purchasing it. But she went on feeling the soft, sheeny luxurious things—with both hands now, holding them up to see them glisten, and to feel them glide serpent-like through her fingers.

Two hectic blotches came suddenly into her pale cheeks. She looked up at the girl.

“Do you think there are any eights-and-a-half among these?”

There were any number of eights-and-a-half. In fact, there were more of that size than any other. Here was a light-blue pair; there were some lavender, some all black and various shades of tan and gray. Mrs. Sommers selected a black pair and looked at them very long and closely. She pretended to be examining their texture, which the clerk assured her was excellent.

“A dollar and ninety-eight cents,” she mused aloud. “Well, I’ll take this pair.” She handed the girl a five-dollar bill and waited for her change and for her parcel. What a very small parcel it was! It seemed lost in the depths of her shabby old shopping-bag.

Kate Chopin, “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897)

Question 3 of 4

A student writes the following two sentences: Mrs. Sommers plans to spend every cent on her children. ______ the first thing she buys is for herself. Which word best fills the blank to show how the ideas connect?

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), from Monday or Tuesday (1921)

Question 4 of 4

A student is writing a body paragraph arguing that Woolf's narrator sees human life as ruled by chance more than by control. Which piece of evidence would best support this claim?

0 of 4 answered