It’s the Friday before the final exam (which takes place on Tuesday at 3 p.m.), and I can feel the trembling excitement in the air. I hope you’re all doing well on all of your exams so far and haven’t got much further to go. Of course, I know there are quite a few of you who still have “miles to go” before you sleep—by which I mean, you know, you have lots to do before you’re finished your journey for this semester. Don’t interpret that to have anything to do with death, please.
Anyway, before I get into writing about how to approach the exam—I’ll save that topic for later in the weekend—there was a student who asked me to write about topic sentences. I think it’s worthwhile simply because it’s an issue that has kept coming back again and again all semester long.
A topic sentence is a statement, usually appearing at the beginning of a paragraph, that indicates what the entire paragraph is about. If your paragraph strays from the plan indicated in the topic sentence, then you need to revise either the topic sentence to fit the paragraph or the paragraph to fit the topic sentence. Either way, there should be nothing in that paragraph that wasn’t suggested in your topic sentence. Likewise, your topic sentence should not suggest the paragraph will entail topics beyond the mandate you’ve give yourself in the first sentence. A good example would be this paragraph wherein the first sentence tells you exactly what the paragraph is about: topic sentences and what they do.
Topic sentences help you organize the essay. If you were writing a critical analysis of William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,” you might have a paragraph on the concept of value in that poem. So what you need is a topic sentence which shows that that’s what your paragraph is about. Notice in the sample paragraph below how the first sentence tells me exactly what the paragraph entails. I’ve put the topic sentence in bold type.
The speaker often uses imagery that suggests the entire experience of dancing with the daffodils is valuable in various ways, especially because he is a poet. He says, “a poet could not but be gay,” emphasizing his vocation as a writer and observer of the world around him, one who tries to express that which many of us might miss or might find difficult to articulate. He is “gay” is because the scene before him has lifted his spirits. Although he has started out “lonely as a cloud,” he has evolved into a person who “dances with the daffodils” in his mind even though he is lying on his couch in a “vacant or pensive mood.” The entire process is valuable because of what it shows him—and the reader—about human nature and about nature itself, that a single moment has the ability to elevate our moods and help us appreciate the world around us, even if we are alone and perhaps especially when we are alone. He says the daffodils are “golden”—comparing them to a precious and rare metal—and says the show has brought him “wealth” that he couldn’t quite understand even at the moment. Because he is a poet, he is able to record his thoughts regarding that moment of transcendence, so that he can use them later. Furthermore, despite not having been there with the speaker at that moment, we too can understand the value of the daffodils, which represent nature’s transforming properties: a single moment of beauty can stay with us forever, especially when we have the words and capacity to articulate our feelings.
I could go on and on with this idea, but I’m hoping that gives you a specific idea of what a topic sentence can do. At several moments as I was writing that paragraph, I looked back to my topic sentence for guidance. I checked to make sure I had given myself permission in that sentence to say that things I said about the nature of a poet and about the imagery he uses. I even deleted some sentences that I realize were slightly off topic, that were getting away from the connection between the “poet” and the symbolism of the moment. For example, if I wanted to talk about the meter and/or rhyme scheme, that's a separate subject and deserves a new paragraph (An example of such a topic sentence might be: Wordsworth's meter and rhyme scheme are constructed to enhance the happy tone that evolves, as well as reflect the idea of memory. Then, explain how meter works in the poem and then explain how rhyme scheme works. Or you could make these topics into separate paragraphs from each other.)
I always visualize an essay or article as a stack of boxes on moving day. Each box should have a label on it; otherwise, I would be very disorganized. The label on each box is the topic sentence. That label should tell me what exactly the box contains. If I open the box that’s labelled “Kitchen Stuff” and find a toilet scrubber, then I haven’t done a very good job of sorting—or I’ve put the wrong label on the box. I might change the label to “Kitchen and Bathroom Stuff”. Really, though, I should take the toilet scrubber out and put it in the box that says “Bathroom Stuff”. What that means, in terms of your writing, is that if a particular sentence doesn’t match up with your topic sentence, then you either revise the topic sentence to fit, or (far better) put that sentence (or partial sentence or whatever it is) in the paragraph into which it fits. In the end, you should have a neat stack of paragraphs, all appropriately labelled. That, my friends, is organization. I should be able to glance at each topic sentence and know exactly what the boxes—I mean, paragraphs—contain.
Hope this helps. Again, picture your paragraphing as a stack of boxes with labels on them, and that should give you the right visual for your essay.
More to come over the weekend. Stay tuned.
GC
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