What happened to the paragraph???!

[rbiton]

Help, here I am teaching highschool and not only do the students, typical nineth graders and very advanced 11th graders, not seem to know to indent the first line of a paragraph, I turned to our book and it's not indented either! Just a space between chunks of writing.

Has something changed in the last two years that I haven't taught and move countries? I've seen in letter templates and so on that sometimes this style - unindented block of text, followed by double-space, followed by unindented block of text - is used, but I figured that was just some modern stylistic thing, not a real paragraph style to TEACH.

Does anyone know anything about this? I'm trying to reteach them quickly. We have an assessment next week and I just took over the class.

Thanks-
rut

[crclee]

Help, here I am teaching highschool and not only do the students, typical nineth graders and very advanced 11th graders, not seem to know to indent the first line of a paragraph, I turned to our book and it's not indented either! Just a space between chunks of writing.

Has something changed in the last two years that I haven't taught and move countries? I've seen in letter templates and so on that sometimes this style - unindented block of text, followed by double-space, followed by unindented block of text - is used, but I figured that was just some modern stylistic thing, not a real paragraph style to TEACH.

Does anyone know anything about this? I'm trying to reteach them quickly. We have an assessment next week and I just took over the class.

Thanks-
rut

Hi

This is usually called "block style" and it is widely used in Europe and other parts of the world. This link to wikipedia may help: Business letter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Block style is not common in the USA, but it's not wrong, per se. I'm from the UK originally but did graduate studies in the USA and used block style to no complaints. So, I would respectfully suggest that you don't need to reteach the students anything with respect to indenting.

I hope this helps.