A Write Right Teaching Blog
My murder-mystery protagonist, Matthew Diggerson, teaches college writing and gets embroiled in murder, and I’ve decided to give him his own blogs, the third of which is this one below. If you’re interested in my stories or just writing/teaching, then you might enjoy these little texts. – D.G.Gillespie.
Professor Matthew Diggerson
Ocean View College
What can you say about a topic sentence (TS) that its name doesn’t already declare? It’s a ‘sentence’ that highlights a ‘topic,’ right? It directly supports and proves the essay’s thesis (the super TS), and a TS usually starts or appears near the top of every body paragraph. All true, but more can be added about these important statements.
Here’s a simple tip: make a TS as short as possible. Quick, direct statements (called ‘simple sentences’) stand out, and since a body paragraph’s main idea (topic) tends to be a noun or short phrase containing a noun, the more of those in a sentence, the more possible topics for a reader to juggle. In other words, excess words can obscure a focusing idea. I think of dramatist Harold Pinter’s belief: “We use words to hide from each other.” Pinter obviously was talking about more than a TS, but his opinion fits this blog.
Try this TS: “Robinson creates metaphors.” No confusion there, right? The paragraph will cover the writer’s metaphors, probably in connection to a thesis involving Robinson’s use of literary elements, such as similes, imagery, symbolism, etc. The ‘metaphors’ would be one of those elements and thus an effective topic for a body paragraph.
But how would that three-word TS lead to an entire body paragraph? For a high school essay, the teacher would probably just want proof, so students would use an illustrative plan—i.e., quoted examples from Robinson’s text (the poem “Richard Cory,” for instance). This narrow approach leads to the denigration of the fabled ‘five-paragraph essay,’ which offers little in the way of creative planning other than repetitive and skimpy paragraphs. Thus, here’s tip two, a hard one this time: for your TS, choose a topic that can be broken down in an interesting way. For instance, with the ‘metaphors’ TS, maybe Robinson creates both positive and negative similes, a contrasting plan; or maybe he uses the metaphors for various reasons, a causal plan. Perhaps the student writer uses chronology as a plan, such as “In stanza one” and then “In the next stanza.” Many choices for that three-word TS exist, but what good are options if a student doesn’t know they exist?
If students offer readers a long TS full of various breakdown ideas, then they will confuse not only the audience, but themselves. Check this TS: “Throughout the poem, Robinson creates both positive and negative metaphors to highlight Richard Cory’s god-like status and to show the townspeople’s difficult lives.” Huh! Despite the nice parallelism in that statement, the bloated TS sends readers in many directions, and why even write the paragraph if all of the ideas are loaded into one sentence?
In short, make your TS’s short and break down their topics in interesting ways. If what you write isn’t unique and intriguing to you, why write at all?