The element stored in paragraph has no text so we need paragraph.innerHTML to change that.
<body>
<h2>New Messages</h2>
<script>
var paragraph = document.createElement("p");
paragraph.innerHTML;
</script>
</body>
To set the text of the new paragraph, code an equal sign followed by a string value.
<body>
<h2>New Messages</h2>
<script>
var paragraph = document.createElement("p");
paragraph.innerHTML = "Joe: football?";
</script>
</body>