Academic writing is a very broad term that can include a great number of different genres, such as research articles, essays, abstracts, papers, among many others. Academic genres imply the use of formal English: words of Latin or French origin, no contractions, compound or complex sentences, and well-organized paragraphs. A paragraph is a set of sentences that begins with a TOPIC SENTENCE that is enlarged with examples, explanations, quotes, paraphrasing, statistics, and other instances of SUPPORTING MATERIAL. These sentences are placed IN GENERAL at the beginning of the paragraph, although INTRODUCTION and CONCLUSION paragraphs are exceptions to this rule. In this video, there is some more information about PARAGRAPH ORGANIZATION. Here there is a kind of conceptual map which includes some characteristics of the parts of a paragraph: What is the topic sentence? Why is it important? ...