I've had no instruction at university level about paragraph structure. There are study skills sessions around writing, and they may provide some guidance. I've always used the guidance I gave at school, which is that a paragraph is a short, coherent unit of thought. If you change topic, you should probably put another paragraph in.
Bear in mind I did my undergraduate 20 years ago, and the assumption was that you already knew how to write essays from school, but you might need to learn a bit about references. Also I studied at Cambridge, so other universities may do things differently. However, when I went to a session about small-group teaching for Humanities subjects at Oxford, there was a strong assumption that we were not there to teach students to write *in general*, but only to write about their subject. I somewhat disagreed with that, since there weren't any other places (at that point) that would teach them anything at all about writing academic English. (Though this is also getting on for 20 years ago now, so one might hope that there are a few more resources available to them now.)
I have encountered other models of writing paragraphs since, but I've felt no need to integrate them into my writing. Topic sentences are all very well if you wish to assume that there is only one right way to write a paragraph, but that seems a very large assumption. Even in scientific papers, we're moving away from passive voice, because we're becoming more aware that researchers are not interchangeable units, even when we're trying to present our material in a way that encourages replication of our results.
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Date: 2022-03-03 05:51 pm (UTC)Bear in mind I did my undergraduate 20 years ago, and the assumption was that you already knew how to write essays from school, but you might need to learn a bit about references. Also I studied at Cambridge, so other universities may do things differently. However, when I went to a session about small-group teaching for Humanities subjects at Oxford, there was a strong assumption that we were not there to teach students to write *in general*, but only to write about their subject. I somewhat disagreed with that, since there weren't any other places (at that point) that would teach them anything at all about writing academic English. (Though this is also getting on for 20 years ago now, so one might hope that there are a few more resources available to them now.)
I have encountered other models of writing paragraphs since, but I've felt no need to integrate them into my writing. Topic sentences are all very well if you wish to assume that there is only one right way to write a paragraph, but that seems a very large assumption. Even in scientific papers, we're moving away from passive voice, because we're becoming more aware that researchers are not interchangeable units, even when we're trying to present our material in a way that encourages replication of our results.