SEXY Paragraph structure:
Statement
Example
eXplanation
whY it is important
Explanations and examples can be in either order, and you may have several per paragraph. You always start with a clear statement which is often short, and indicates the main idea of the paragraph.
Here is a sample paragraph from an excellence connections report from a previous year:
Patriotism:
Patriotism is pure devotion and loyalty to one’s country. Patriotism has an astounding ability to express societal morality but only functions as far as the popular society will allow it. As a way for new public permittance to be found, we have to discover what is and is not acceptable. So, patriotism is able to uncover the viewpoints of society on war simply by offending them. It not only motivates war to occur, but motivates people to take part in it and support it. A prominent theme in Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est is patriotism. “Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori,” can be translated to “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” which is what was written on the finalising line of the poem. Owen referred to this as ‘the old lie’ as he believed if the horrors experienced by soldiers in war were more widely acknowledged, people would not feed the future generations with such falsehoods. Referring to patriotism as an old lie shows how timeless it is as it has been seen since the earliest wars and was used as a way of covering up the evils of war even back then. If patriotic lies were not used to cover up the brutalities of war, soldiers would have been a lot more reluctant to fight in it and people’s support would have been hard to obtain. So instead, war was and still is upheld on the basis of lies. Owen’s initial feelings toward war were that he felt heroic but eventually they manifested into anger. He came to realise that what war propaganda was promoting, was extremely biased when it came to what horrors truly awaited soldiers on the battlefield. Suicide in The Trenches by Siegfried Sassoon also shows the ill perceptions patriotism places on war by referring to the crowds as ‘smug-faced’ as they watch soldiers march by. This shows that society had complete disregard for the damage placed on soldiers and only acknowledged that those men fought for and protected their country, despite what they went through in doing so.
You can see that the student (who we shall call Student X) has identified patriotism as the key focus of the paragraph. Student X has then developed her ideas on patriotism, with specific, extended reference to the texts she has studied.
