Capture Your Reader's Interest
Think about the experience of a football fan who watches his or her favorite team execute complicated plays and break specific records with just the right line-up of players. Compare that with the experience of somebody who's watching a bunch of interchangeable guys run around for four hours doing...something.
You've no doubt read boring essays in your life, and maybe some of them were written by you. A key to making your essay interesting and effective is to ensure that it's fully developed. An essay is well-developed when it includes sufficient and appropriate supporting details and examples. A paper with paragraphs that aren't well-developed is, simply put, vague and boring.
Let's say that you're writing a paper arguing that your city should make it illegal for drivers to use cell phones while behind the wheel. Your major persuasive points might be that cell phone use is clearly a distracting behavior and that distracted drivers cause a high number of car accidents. If you keep your points overly broad and general, without getting into specific examples, your paper will suffer from lack of thorough development. Not only will your reader wind up bored, but your instructor will deduct points because you haven't supported your arguments.
So, to capture your reader's interest - and ratchet up your grade - you'll need to get specific. You could develop your body paragraphs by providing statistics of accident rates in other cities with cell phone bans for drivers before and after the laws were put in place. You could also make an emotional appeal to your reader by briefly relating the story of a family that has been affected by an accident caused by texting and driving. By doing this, you'll engage your reader and provide evidence to support your argument.
Maximize Impact
So, in order for your essay to be clear and easily understood, you'll include a topic sentence near the start of each body paragraph, and you'll use a clear and logical order for your supporting sentences. In order to fully develop your paragraph and capture your reader's interest, you'll include plenty of supporting details and examples.
In order to maximize the impact of your paragraphs on your reader, you'll want to think about your writing style and how you'll present all of this information. One question that students often have when it comes to structuring paragraphs is how long they should be. We know we need a topic sentence, some supporting sentences in the middle and, sometimes, a concluding sentence that wraps up our points for the paragraph. But just how many sentences should go in the middle?
There's not a hard and fast rule that tells us how many sentences a paragraph should have. If you're working on a timed essay exam and you need to assess quickly whether your paragraphs are a reasonable length, a good rule of thumb is that each paragraph should be in the ballpark of around six or seven sentences (including your topic sentence and concluding sentence). Some effective paragraphs are quite short, though.
If you find that your paragraph is getting to around ten sentences or so, you should consider breaking it up into smaller paragraphs so that your reader can follow your ideas more easily. Think about the football viewer who gets lost in the complexities of the game as it drags on and on. A paragraph that takes up a full page can get confusing and may be hard for a reader to wade through. You don't want your reader to be tempted to skip a long, unwieldy paragraph.
As you write your essay, think also about varying your sentence structure. In other words, don't use the same pattern or structure for each sentence in a paragraph, and try to avoid using several overly short sentences. Let's say you were to write the following sentences in one of your body paragraphs:
'Drivers who use cell phones cause accidents. These accidents could be prevented. Our city should pass a law banning cell phone use by drivers. This law should be strictly enforced. This law would make our roads safer.'
You may notice that these sentences have the same rhythm and that they have a short subject-verb construction - meaning that they are all brief sentences that feature the subject first followed quickly by the verb. Teachers want to see that you can use more complex sentence structure. For example:
'Drivers who use cell phones cause accidents that could be prevented. To reduce the number of car accidents, our city should pass a law banning cell phone use by drivers. If this law were strictly enforced, our roads would be safer.'
Avoiding short subject-verb sentences tends to make your writing a bit more interesting, and your reader may be more engaged with your paper.