point of your paragraph. However, the more involved or difficult your central idea is, the more illustrations or examples you may need, each varying slightly in subject matter but tending When the child has acquired some language, we get some extraordinary glimpses of this Example/Illustration handout 1 JOHNSON COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE EXAMPLE/ ILLUSTRATION Illustration presents material to the reader in the form of action, expressed or implied. The quality of action makes illustration or example particularly different from detail and reason as basic material for building better paragraphs. A paragraph may have as its basic material one or more illustrations or examples. Whether you employ one or several will depend, to a large extent, on the complexity of the thought expressed in the controlling idea and on your own ingenuity. One long, well-constructed, vivid illustration may be sufficiently persuasive of the toward the same objective--namely, effective support of the topic sentence. Sample ILLUSTRATION paragraphs fantastic world: When my friend David was two and a half years old, he was being prepared for a trip to Europe with his parents. He was a very bright child, talked well for his age and seemed to take in everything his parents had to say with interest and enthusiasm. The whole family would fly to Europe (David knew what an airplane was), As children crowd around, Anai-Anai tells 6f the shark's capture: “We left two nights ago. The wind was strong. The boat flooded, and we thought we would capsize. We they would see many unusual things, they would go swimming, go on trains, meet some know how to fly, yet!" of David's friends there. The preparation story was carried on with just the right amount of emphasis for a couple of weeks before the trip. But after a while David's parents noticed that he stopped asking questions about "Yurp" and even seemed depressed when he heard his parents talk about it. The parents tried to find out what was troubling him. He was most reluctant to talk about it. Then one day, David came out with his secret in an agonizing confession. "I can't go to Yurp!” he said, and the tears came very fast. "I don't Selma H. Fraiberg The Magic Years didn't sleep. We bounced on the black sea all next day and night. But this morning the sea was flat. We started looking for him. We dropped a hook baited with stingray in the sea. Then we rattled in the water coconut shells tied to a pole and we sang: 'Come you Kalitan, show us your fin that slices the water like a sharp blade. Come, we have been waiting. You are beautiful, you must be ours.' He came. When he caught the hook, Jawarani hurled the harpoon into his side. He battled furiously. Finally he surrendered." Anne De Henning Singh “Sea Gypsies of the Philippines”For instance, the distance between pitcher and catcher is a matter of twenty paces, but it doesn't seem like enough when you have a catcher's mitt and try to hold a pitcher with the speed of Dizzy Dean or Dazzy Vance. Not even the sponge that catchers wear in the palm of the hand when working with fast-ball pitchers and the bulky mitt are sufficient to rob the ball of shock and sting that lames your hand unless you know to ride with the throw and kill some of its speed. The pitcher, standing on his little elevated mound, looms up Example/Illustration handout 2 It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take the umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil. C. Northcote Parkinson Parkinson's Law Sample EXAMPLE paragraphs All good readers know, of course, that they are living instead of merely reading. In other words, they know that they are adding untold knowledge and understanding to their lives, becoming wiser, more experienced in the ways of the world. Don Quixote shows them the transforming power of the human imagination--how dreams can make life not only bearable, but exciting, no matter what one pays for such excitement. King Saul proves to them how costly goodness itself can be and alas! often is; for Saul was a good man, even a noble one, who paid dearly and ironically for his very sense of honor. No tragic hero in any Greek play is more tragic than Saul. Tess of the D'Urbervilles brings all good readers not only to tears, but to a new understanding of outraged innocence, a new pity for all who live. Destoyevsky shows them through his three Karamazov brothers how dangerous a mere intellect can be, how much more perilous is the mind than are the affections, no matter how misguidedly one loves. Life may well be circumscribed for many of us; but it is never circumscribed for any of us once we learn how to read. Mary Ellen Chase "Why Teach Literature?” Major-league baseball is one of the most difficult and precise of all games, but you would never know it unless you went down on the field and got close to it and tried it yourself. enormously over you at that short distance, and when he ties himself into a coiled spring preparatory to letting fly, it requires all your self-control not to break and run for safety. And as for the things they can do with a baseball, those major-league pitchers...! One way of finding out is to wander down on the field an hour or so before game-time when there is no pressure on them, pull on the catcher's glove, and try to hold them. Paul Gallico “The Feel”Example/Illustration handout 3 Beware of nouns of very general meaning, like circumstances, cases, instances, aspects, factors, relationships, attitudes, eventualities, etc. In most circumstances you will find that those cases of writing, which contain too many instances of words like these, wil1 in this and other aspects have factors leading to unsatisfactory relationships with the reader resulting in unfavorable attitudes on his part and perhaps other eventualities, like a grade of "D." Notice also what etc. means. It means: "I'd like to make this list longer, but I can't think of