Locate the topic sentence. Tell which paragraph shape and pattern type this paragraph is. The art of letter writing seems to have declined sharply in
recent years. 2Perhaps the rising cost of stationery
and postage is a factor. 3Most people today are so busy with their jobs, their families, and their hobbies that
they .do not feel they have time to write
letters. 4To a certain extent, television and personal computers have
replaced communicating with friends as a form of entertainment. 5The advent of the telephone and the use of
e-mail, however, are probably the most significant factor in the decrease of letter writing, because they give
instant access to friends and loved ones.
topic sentence:
paragraph structure "shape":
pattern:

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant