Reading Skills

Reading skills: Along with having topic sentences and supporting details, paragraphs are also organized to achieve a 

certain purpose. However, just as a paragraph can contain different types of supporting details, a paragraph may also include more than one organizational pattern. Listed here are some common patterns for organizing a paragraph: • Cause and Effect: for showing how one thing leads to another • Chronological Order: for narrating events that occurred over time • Classification: for grouping things together according to their features • Compare and Contrast: for showing how things are similar or different • Definition and example: for defining a term or idea then expanding it with examples • Description: for listing details • Episode: for presenting details or information about a specific event or anecdote