Sherlock Holmes is known for his intuition, and his ability to make quick, rational deductions from what he sees and hears. Write a paragraph...

It seems to me that the paragraph you write for your assignment could begin with more or less the same words as those stated in the question:

Sherlock Holmes is known for his intuition, and his ability to make quick, rational deductions from what he sees and hears.

The next sentence would most likely refer to the specific story under discussion.

Good examples of the detective's superior mental abilities can be seen in his story "The Adventure of the Speckled Band."

You don't have to look through the whole story to find your examples. In a typical Sherlock Holmes story the detective exhibits his uncanny mental powers near the beginning. Throughout the main body of the story Watson, the narrator, only describes what Holmes says and does--but Watson rarely tells the reader what Holmes is thinking until after the whole case is solved. Then at the end of the story Holmes will frequently explain what he had been thinking during his investigation. This is true in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band."

Holmes deduces that Helen Stoner traveled by dog cart to the railroad station because of the mud on left arm of her jacket and the return ticket he spots in the glove on her left hand. He must have sensed intuitively that she was covering up some bruise marks, which he uncovers by pushing back the frilly cuff of Helen's sleeve. She acknowledges that the five little livid spots were made by the grasp of her violent stepfather.

Then at the end of the story, after the fiendish Dr. Grimesby Roylott has been killed by his own snake, Holmes explains some of his thinking to his friend and companion Dr. Watson. This is the best place to find examples of Holmes' powers of deduction. The explanation begins with the following words:

My attention was speedily drawn, as I have already remarked to you, to this ventilator, and to the bell-rope which hung down to the bed. The discovery that this was a dummy, and that the bed was clamped to the floor, instantly gave rise to the suspicion that the rope was there as a bridge for something passing through the hole and coming to the bed. The idea of a snake instantly occurred to me, and when I coupled it with my knowledge that the doctor was furnished with a supply of creatures from India, I felt that I was probably on the right track. 

You could probably paraphrase most of the above paragraph if you want to include the information in one paragraph. For example, you could say:

Sherlock Holmes explains to Watson that his attention was speedily drawn to the ventilator, and to the bell-rope which hung down to the bed. 

And so on. In that case you would not need to use quotation marks.

So examples of Sherlock Holmes' intuition and his ability to make quick, rational deductions from what he sees and hears are typically to be found at the beginning and conclusion of the stories. The middle part deals with the strange characters he invariably meets, with Watson's observations of Holmes' "methods" of investigation, and with the "adventure" aspect of the story which is almost always present. For instance, in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" Holmes has to cope with a poisonous snake which ends up killing his dangerous and half-insane adversary Dr. Grimesby Roylott.