HOW TO WRITE AN 8 SENTENCE PARAGRAPH HOW TO WRITE AN 8 SENTENCE PARAGRAPH Written by Jay Sternitzky Illustration by Matt Strackbein Written by Jay Sternitzky Illustration by Matt Strackbein My teacher assigned me an eight sentence paragraph to write. So, start with… …my introduction! Even though near Earth asteroids are in the news every week it seems, the chances of an astroid striking our planet any time soon is highly unlikely. …but scientists do have some idea how often they happen. Collisions with the Earth are random events,… Small asteroids, or meteorites as they are known once they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, are a very low hazard. There has never been a report of a human being killed by one. Traffic, pollution and even lightning are much more dangerous than small meteorites. Localized events, such as the 1908 Tunguska event, happen every couple of hundred years and is the equivalent to a hydrogen bomb. A regional destruction, such as an impact in Southeast Asia, occurs in intervals of one hundred thousand years and would devastate a mid sized country. A true global destruction event happens less often than every ten million years. The K-T Event, which is thought to cause the extinction of dinosaurs, was one such event. ...NASA has already discovered most of near Earth asteroids larger than 1 km, and none of them seem to be heading this way. It is highly unlikely that a regional or global destruction would occur in next couple of centuries because... Now write your concluding sentence. It should restate your idea. One more supporting sentence! Continue to write sentences that support your idea. …or introduce another item to go with your idea. The next sentence can further expand on the position of the previous sentence,… YIKES! Now write a sentence which begins to support your idea. This sentence tells the reader what the paragraph is about. The next sentence should be the introduction of the idea you are writing about.