Secondary school teachers expect students to write comprehensible paragraphs in their texts. However, an explicit way of teaching to write a paragraph doesn’t exist. This article describes a text analytic study of compliance with language norms in paragraphs in two genres: e-mails with a request and persuasive texts. It addresses the question to what extent the paragraphs of thirteen- and seventeen-year-old students comply with the paragraph norms constructed on the basis of Dutch professional advisory books. Our findings indicate that students in Dutch secondary school have difficulty writing adequate paragraphs. Our results additionally suggest that students’ paragraph skills increase over time and vary across genres.