ACT® · Reading — Craft and Structure: Text Structure
Identifying a Clear Paragraph Function
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow do blocks clicking into an outline show what each paragraph contributes?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't a paragraph's function just a restatement of its topic sentence?
- Worked exampleShow me labelling five paragraphs as claim, background, evidence, objection and answer.
- Going furtherWhat happens to the outline when a writer spends two paragraphs on the same job?
Check yourself
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Informational passage:
[1] School start times should move later.
[2] Adolescent sleep cycles shift by about 3 hours at puberty and shift back in the twenties; this is biology rather than habit. The same shift appears in adolescents kept from screens and in those who are not.
[3] Districts that moved their start by 59 minutes report attendance up and collisions among teenage drivers down by 24 percent.
[4] It is said that later starts wreck the after-school schedule. Where they have been tried, sports moved and the schedule held. Practices ran an hour later and attendance at them did not fall.
Paragraph 3 functions as:End of topic.