When teaching paragraph structure and writing, it is often a good idea to have some sample paragraphs that one can use as examples. Here are a few that I have found. For better or worse, the reading level of the paragraphs is not high. When I taught at the proprietary college, the students, although native English speakers in most cases, were often not able to read them well enough to understand them. And with English language learners, they also are quite likely to have difficulty in understanding the sentences. Nevertheless, here are a few good paragraphs written by a few of my favorite writers or media personalities.
GOOD PARAGRAPHS
“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this
world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in
return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.”
― Anthony Bourdain
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things
that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very
easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard
money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame
and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and
powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than
any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come
from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass
of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love
themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
“I don't mind exercise but it's a private activity. Joggers
should run in a wheel - like hamsters - because I don't want to look at them.
And I really hate people who go on an airplane in jogging outfits. That's a
major offense today, even bigger than Spandex bicycle pants. You see
eighty-year-old women coming on the plane in jogging outfits for comfort. Well
my comfort - my mental comfort - is completely ruined when I see them coming.
You're on an airplane, not in your bedroom, so please! And I really hate walkathons:
blocking traffic, people patting themselves on the back. The whole attitude
offends me. They have this smug look on their faces as they hold you up in
traffic so that they can give two cents to some charity.”
― John Waters
“You don’t need fashion designers when you are young. Have
faith in your own bad taste. Buy the cheapest thing in your local thrift shop -
the clothes that are freshly out of style with even the hippest people a few
years older than you. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents
- that is the key to fashion leadership. Ill-fitting is always stylish. But be
more creative - wear your clothes inside out, backward, upside down. Throw
bleach in a load of colored laundry. Follow the exact opposite of the dry
cleaning instructions inside the clothes that cost the most in your thrift
shop. Don’t wear jewelry - stick Band-Aids on your wrists or make a necklace
out of them. Wear Scotch tape on the side of your face like a bad face-lift
attempt. Mismatch your shoes. Best yet, do as Mink Stole used to do: go to the
thrift store the day after Halloween, when the children’s trick-or-treat
costumes are on sale, buy one, and wear it as your uniform of defiance.”
― John Waters, Role Models
Philip K. Dick
"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities
are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by
religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real?
Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very
sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not
distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it
is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the
mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
— Philip K. Dick
Seagal is looking wider and moving slower than ever, and
part of the joy of his pictures these days is seeing how they will try to
convince the audience that he is some sort of an action hero. Early on it looks
like all the action will be vehicle related, driving jeeps around splashing in
puddles or a hilarious scene where he commandeers a small plane to scare its
pilot into giving him information. (The pilot says his nickname is Crash
“because I never have” – like that’s something to brag about. Shouldn’t most
pilots be nicknamed Crash then?) But hang in there because there are some fight
scenes that really deliver the laughs. Seagal has apparently thrown out the
girdle and lets it all hang for some of his most Dolemite-esque fights to date.
“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I
was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into
nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an
interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I
really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”
― Charles Bukowski
“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the
speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He
crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever
giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for
all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid
freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a
hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was
the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a
generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the
essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that
somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the
tunnel.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
