A curriculum for intermediate composition for students of English as a second language is presented based on the use of levels of specificity as an organizing principle. The course objective is for students to write well-planned, coherent paragraphs acceptable to the American academic audience, within limited formats. Two additional fundamentals guiding a student's efforts are to write what he knows about, and to write for an audience. The first part of the course is devoted to the identification of the paragraph topic and the narrowing of broad subjects to manageable topics. Then students are introduced to the concept of the topic sentence. Following extended work with student-generated paragraphs, students begin to plan original paragraphs about assigned or student-selected topics. When students can clearly demonstrate that they understand the necessity of using specific detail in paragraph writing, the focus turns to the arrangement of detail in acceptable academic paragraph form, later using the technique of writing the same material in various paragraph formats to compare organizing methods. Cause-and-effect paragraphs are also used as an alternative form. Sample exercises are provided for each course segment and concept. (MSE)