Are the paragraphs fully developed?
The most common problem with paragraphs is that they often aren’t developed logically. Writers have either failed to work out the logic of their argument, or they have problems expressing that argument clearly and coherently (more on coherence in a moment). Often, however, the problem is that the writer doesn’t understand that paragraph development requires logic. Writers who have been taught to write using the five-paragraph-theme model often believe that paragraphs exist to give examples of the point they’ve declared in the topic sentence – when in fact, paragraphs exist to develop that point. For example: A student is writing a paper whose argument is that Fitzgerald’s work is autobiographical. He sees this trend in three novels: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon. He decides to make his first paragraph a list of all of the ways that Jay Gatsby is like Fitzgerald. The second paragraph does the same for Tender is the Night, and so on. What the writer of this p
