It is recommended to provide your students with a printout of the Expository Terminology page and the Expository Paragraph Form. As Dr. Louis works through the next several videos, students will copy the model body paragraph onto the Expository Paragraph Form and take notes on the Expository Terminology page.

In this video, Dr. Louis begins with the importance of associating different colors with different functions of sentences in a body paragraph. Then, Dr. Louis discusses the importance of indenting. The main skill to learn in this video, however, is that an academic body paragraph begins with a topic sentence, the first sentence in a body paragraph. For literary analysis and personal narrative, the TS includes the subject of the paragraph and the writer’s opinion (commentary). For argumentation and expository/informational, the TS includes the subject of the paragraph, but, depending on the assignment, what follows might include something other than commentary. The TS does the same thing for a body paragraph that the thesis does for the whole essay.