Ever since you left behind picture books, you’ve known that writing is organized into paragraphs. These blocks of text help you read by breaking up ideas and organizing them into groups.
Since you’ve created an outline, you already know the order in which your ideas will appear. You also know the topic of each paragraph or section in your report (the text beside the Roman numerals), and you know the details that will support or explain each of these ideas (the text next to the capital letters). Now you just need to turn your outline into sentences and paragraphs.
Here’s how Dev created some of the paragraphs in his report, based on a section of his outline. Compare the outlined ideas on the top to the paragraph beneath it.
- IV. Social interactions are based on the idea of respecting others.
- A. Bowing is a sign of respect – there are different levels of bowing
- B. Staring into someone’s eyes is considered rude and disrespectful.
Compared to Americans, Japanese people treat each other very formally. A bow replaces a handshake in greetings, and different bows show different levels of respect. How deeply someone bows depends on how much respect he or she wants to show the other person. In Japan, it’s also considered rude to stare into someone’s eyes. Japanese people do not make eye contact in crowded places to show respect for others. These social customs are meant to honor others and to show reserve, two very important traits to the Japanese.
Question
How is Dev’s paragraph different from section of the outline―what did Dev add?
Try doing what Dev did. Copy and paste the first few sections of your outline onto a new page in your Culture Research Report file. Then, turn that part of your outline into sentences and paragraphs instead, using Dev’s paragraph as a model. When you have written paragraphs for the first part of your report, copy and paste the rest of your outline, and replace those sections with paragraphs, too. Be sure to save your work, and keep your report file open so you can continue working on it.
