Web Page: Topic Sentences
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To Write a Paragraph
- Question the communication situation.
- Subject: What specific topic will you write about?
- Purpose: Why are you writing—to explain, to narrate, to persuade?
- Audience: Who will read this paragraph?
- Plan your paragraph.
- Identify your topic. Make it specific enough to cover in one paragraph.
- Research your topic.
- Searching: Consult primary and secondary sources as needed to learn about your topic. (See pages 376–391.)
- Focusing: Decide on a focus—the part of the topic that you want to emphasize in your paragraph.
Topic: East Africa
Focus: is facing a food crisis
State the focus in a topic sentence.
Topic sentence: Drought, high food prices, and extreme poverty are contributing to a severe food crisis in East Africa.
- Shaping: List important details that support or explain your topic. Arrange the details in the most logical order.
- Create the first draft.
- Start with a topic sentence that focuses the paragraph.
- Follow with a variety of details that support the topic sentence.
- Organize the middle sentence in an effective pattern. (See page 188.)
- End with a sentence that ties the ideas in the paragraph together.
- Improve your first draft.
- Evaluate your first draft.
Purpose: Does the paragraph effectively fulfill your purpose?
Audience: Will the paragraph hold the reader’s interest?
- Revise your writing.
Rewrite sentences that are confusing or unclear.
Add details to explain your topic more fully.
Reorder sentences that are out of place.
- Edit your revised writing.
Replace general nouns and verbs with specific ones.
Check your writing for accuracy.
- Evaluate your first draft.
- Present the final copy of your paragraph to your classmates or upload it to your blog.
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Paragraph
Here is an example paragraph created by a student for his history class. The student has included a clear topic sentence, body sentences that offer strong supporting details in an effective order, and a closing sentence that sums up the main idea.
In John Adams’s Defense
The topic sentence (underlined) tells the reader what the paragraph is about. The courage and conviction that would later mark John Adams’s presidency was fully displayed in his defense of British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. After British soldiers shot and killed five Americans in Boston on March 5, 1770, the soldiers and their captain, Thomas Preston, were detained and left without legal representation. The body sentences provide support for the topic sentence. Several Boston lawyers, fearing criticism from fellow Americans and anxious for the safety of their families, declined to defend the soldiers. Adams was 34 at the time and faced similar fears. Yet he believed so deeply that everyone should be afforded a fair trial that he took the case without hesitation. An outsider might declare Adams’s decision to be unpatriotic, but to Adams, it was the very definition of patriotism. He would later say his defense of the British soldiers was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.” The closing sentence refers again to the main idea and offers a final thought. At a moment of crisis and in the face of public scrutiny, Adams stood up for a core American value—that every person has the right to defense in a court of law. He was 34 at the time, but John Adams was already showing signs of becoming a great leader.