Logical organization skills in paragraph development

Effective writing depends on one's ability to structure and organize words and sentences into a meaningful whole requiring a host of skills in content, organization, and style. Hence, this study investigated the logical organization skills as a higher order thinking skill of sophomore college students in identifying topic sentences and in determining the major and minor ideas using jumbled sentences in seven modes of paragraph development such as details, definition, examples, process, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, and classification. It made use of descriptive-correlational design through a written test and a survey questionnaire. The respondents of the study were second year college students from different colleges/departments and who had taken up the subject Writing in the Discipline. Results show that students have a good performance in identifying topic sentences. However, the results in identifying the major idea show that they have not fully mastered the skill. Similarly, students’ performance in sequencing ideas also shows that they have not fully mastered the skill in identifying minor ideas in its proper sequence in order to form a coherent paragraph. On the whole, it was found that overall performance of students in logical organization and their competence in paragraph organization using the seven modes of paragraph development have been found fair.