WRITING TOPIC SENTENCES
When you write a sentence, remember these two points:
1. A topic sentence should be neither too general nor too specific. If it is too general,
the reader cannot tell exactly what the paragraph is going to discuss. If it is too
specific, the writer may not have anything left to write about in the rest of the
paragraph.
Think of a topic sentence as being like the name of a particular course on a
restaurant menu. When you order food in a restaurant, you want to know more
about a particular course than just "meat" or "soup" or "salad." You want to know
generally what kind of salad it is. Potato salad? Mixed green salad? Fruit salad?
However, you do not necessarily want to know all of its ingredients.
Similarly, the reader of a paragraph wants to know generally what to expect
in a paragraph, but he/she does not want to learn all of the specific details in the
first sentence.
Too general: American food is terrible.
Too specific: American food is tasteless and greasy because
Americans use too many canned, frozen, and
prepackaged foods and because everything is fried in
oil or butter.
Good: American food is tasteless and greasy.
2. Do not include too many unrelated ideas in your topic sentence; if you do, your
paragraph will not be unified.
Too many ideas: San Francisco is famous for its temperate climate, its many
tourist attractions, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere.
The three parts of this controlling idea are too unrelated for a single
paragraph. They would require three separate paragraphs.
Good: San Francisco is famous for its cosmopolitan atmosphere.
