DEVELOPMENT
Although most students understand purpose and have little difficulty referring to it in their topic sentences in their paragraphs, developing the thesis might be the most difficult task of the writing process. Students often know how they feel, but are not able to articulate it, mostly because they have not been taught enough composition strategies.
The importance of teaching students strategies for development cannot be emphasized enough, especially in personal essays. Rhetorical modes, such as comparison, definition, classification, cause and effect, or examples are effective means to amplifying an idea. In a paper arguing for a smoke-free campus, a student could claim discouraging smoking in teens and young adults as a reason for the policy, which is a good reason. For many students, getting past the reason in a paragraph is difficult because they do not know how to flesh out or support their reason. A typical draft paragraph might look like this:
One of the reasons that smoking should be banned on campus is that it will discourage smoking among teens and young adults. Many of the people who cannot quit today began smoking when they were young. If people do not start smoking as teens, maybe they will not take up the habit later. Therefore, smoking should be banned on campus.
The paragraph fails to develop the topic sentence by not showing how one action is related to another. Also, it makes additional claims in sentences two and three. Sentence four simply restates the topic sentence. A paragraph using cause/effect as a dominant strategy would prevent writing too many claims in a paragraph, which disrupts unity, and it would develop the theme:
To discourage the smoking habit, smoking should be banned on college campuses, where teens and young adults’ learning experiences extend beyond books and lectures. What activities college students observe other adults and authority figures engaged in is as important a learning experience as what they write about in tests and papers. Adult faculty, staff, and administrators openly smoking around students reinforces the acceptability of the habit, just as any other habit or practice adults openly perform daily reinforces the acceptability or normality of them, such as greeting people with handshakes or friends with hugs. No one questions these behaviors, so, in turn, children grow into adults feeling quite comfortable shaking hands or hugging. Teens and young adults on college campuses, having reached the legal age to smoke, will feel quite comfortable smoking on campus, as no one questions the practice there.
The second paragraph is a developed paragraph, unlike the first. The main idea, that youth learn habits and practices by watching others, is fleshed out with details and examples. The language is specific, not vague. You can tell your students that examples and details build a paragraph. Often, however, those details and examples are support for a dominant rhetorical mode. A good exercise is to take a topic sentence that makes a claim and ask students to develop the paragraph using each of the modes. What you want students to discover is that there are numerous ways to amplify their ideas in a thoughtful, critical manner. Students who ably develop one paragraph or two often find that they have little else to add to their theme. If they know that they can show readers another way to look at an idea by using another method of development rather than repeating what they have written in the same mode, (or worse, repeating their claim), students will feel less intimidated by the task.
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URL: http://www.siue.edu/ENGLISH/Comp_Manual/development.html
Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 13, 2003 by English Web Manager
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