Teaching the Paragraph as a Structural Unit
Richard G. Warner · College Composition and Communication · 1979
them to make the relevant generalizations about paragraph structure. These generalizations fall into three main categories: (1) a generative component, which specifies the constituents of a wellformed paragraph; (2) a transformational component, which accounts for variations of the simple, analytical paragraph; and (3) the rhetorical component, which motivates the transformations operating on a given paragraph according to its place in a larger discourse. The generative component is based on the trivial observation that paragraphs are composed of sentences. Formally: