Even at an early age, children are guided by their intuitions as they write. Intuitions are the culmination of perceptions that have been internalized and synthesized into patterns. Furthermore, they take time to develop. Consequently, if systematic instruction is to play a part in the formation of intuitions about written language then it must start early and be continuous. Instruction in paragraphing depends in part on how much experience the child has had writing sentences. Nevertheless, paragraph instruction in the elementary grades should focus on invention, writing a paragraph on one subject, and the visual form of the paragraph. The teacher should concentrate on training the student to become an accurate observer. The student can be taught to place things in classes and ultimately to develop generalizations about these classes in the form of statements by listing reasons for placing them in these groups. Development of the paragraph should be introduced only in terms of adding facts about the same subject. At the secondary school level, continued practice in using various categorizing principles to sort and classify information should be encouraged. Instead of simply generating a main idea, students can be made aware of the characteristics of the topic sentence and how topic sentences can differ in terms of the role that they play. An understanding of the completeness should be taught after initial mastery of the topic sentence because the student will than have an awareness of the effect of the topic sentence on setting parameters for the paragraph. Then, development, coherence, and rhetorical function can be emphasized. Such an increasingly detailed analysis of the paragraph is one that should result in increasingly sophisticated writing intuitions. (HOD)