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RELATED PAGES The Lego Model | Body Paragraphs | Topic Sentences: Varsity Level | Background Paragraphs | Argumentative Paragraphs | Example Paragraphs |
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ON THIS PAGE Topic Sentences Are Signposts | Every Topic Sentence Follows Three Rules | Common Mistakes | Next Steps |
Topic Sentences Are Signposts
A topic sentence is a sign on the side of the road telling your reader where they are and where you’re taking them next.
In the late 1990s I was stationed at Atsugi airbase in Japan, and we traveled back and forth to the aircraft carrier stationed in Yokosuka regularly. The local Japanese were aware that route was used frequently by American sailors, so they were kind enough to post many English signs along the way. Basically, as long as you stayed on the route, it was hard to get lost.
Away from that well-traveled route, however, every sign was in Kanji (the written symbols used by the Japanese). On roadways and in train stations, there were no hints in English to tell you where you were, or where you were going.
A group of friends coming back from the ship one day made a wrong turn and found themselves in unfamiliar surroundings. There was no English anywhere once they were off the main road, and while a great many Japanese people study English for years, speaking it with a stranger is a different matter. Getting it wrong in public is genuinely embarrassing in a culture that values doing a thing properly, so most people will politely decline rather than risk it, and nobody stepped forward to help a carload of lost sailors. The drive normally took forty-five minutes. Without signs to help them, it took them nine hours to make it home.
This is what can happen when a paper or essay has no topic sentences. Everything can be perfectly clear to a writer who already knows the way, while readers get lost trying to follow the thread of the argument or discussion.
Every Topic Sentence Follows Three Rules
Topic sentences help readers understand how each paragraph contributes to the overall argument or discussion of your essay or paper.
When we write, we want readers to understand our ideas. We want to avoid situations where we deliver way. If you topic sentences don’t consistently identify the paragraph main focus and connect appropriately to other parts of your essay or paper, your discussion may feel haphazard or confusing. Your paper or essay may be hard to follow because you have not been intentional about structuring your topic sentences carefully. To avoid this situation, every topic sentence you write should follow the three rules below.
MEET ALICIA
Alicia is writing her first paper of the semester, and she’s picked women’s suffrage as her topic.
Topic: the campaign to win American women the right to vote, which ended in 1920 with the 19th Amendment, the constitutional amendment barring states from denying the vote on account of sex.
Draft thesis statement: The 19th Amendment was a crucial step forward for women’s rights.
She knows topic sentences are her weak spot, and right now she’s stuck on one body paragraph. The main point she wants to make there is that the amendment gave women direct political influence for the first time.
The topic sentence should be the first sentence of the body paragraph.
A sign posted after it is needed is no help to anybody. If your reader has to work through four sentences before they find out what your paragraph is about, they’ve likely spent those four sentences guessing, and some of that guessing will be wrong. Put the sign where they’ll see it first, and they’ll understand how those four sentences fit into the larger discussion.
Key Insight: In a first draft, your topic sentence often shows up somewhere in the middle of the paragraph, because that’s the point where you finally worked out what you wanted to say. That’s normal, and it’s not a mistake. When you revise to make sure your topic sentences are nailed down, scan your paragraphs for a sentence that already does the job before you start writing a new one from scratch. Most of the time it’s sitting there in sentence three or four, and the fix is to move it to the front of the paragraph.
ALICIA’S PAPER
That’s exactly what happened to Alicia. Her first body paragraph opens with two sentences of census figures, and then sentence three reads:
| BURIED | The 19th Amendment was crucial because it gave women direct political influence for the first time. |
That sentence is doing everything a topic sentence should do. It’s just in the wrong place. She didn’t need to write anything new, she needed to move it to the top and let the census figures follow it.
Your topic sentence should state the main focus of the paragraph, in specific terms.
A reader should be able to read your first sentence and know exactly what the rest of the paragraph will be about.
ALICIA’S PAPER
Alicia’s second body paragraph is about how politicians changed their behavior once women could vote. She has good material in it: candidates who had ignored women for years suddenly campaigning on maternal and infant health, and Congress passing the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921.
Then she read her opening sentence:
| VAGUE | Voting changed things for women. |
That sentence could sit on top of almost any paragraph in her paper. It doesn’t say what changed, for whom, or when, and her reader wouldn’t find out this paragraph is about politicians until four sentences in.
So she asked herself what this paragraph, specifically, was covering, and put that answer in the sentence:
| FOCUSED | Once women could vote, candidates began campaigning on issues they had ignored for decades, starting with maternal and infant health. |
Same paragraph, same research. Her reader now knows where they are from the first line.
Your topic sentence should also connect the paragraph to an idea elsewhere in your paper or essay.
Topic sentences can connect to the paper or essay topic, your claim / thesis statement, or to a point made in an earlier paragraph. At the end of the day, a paper or essay is a collection of ideas. To avoid having those ideas feel like a mashup, you can connect them together in key ways to help readers see the bigger picture.
When you link ideas together in a careful and intentional way, that intentionality translates as clarity for the reader, since they are able to understand how each idea fits within the larger structure of the argument or discussion.
ALICIA’S PAPER
Her third body paragraph covers women running for office themselves, and here’s how it opens:
| ORPHAN | Women won seats in state legislatures across the country throughout the 1920s. |
This topic sentence is specific and accurate. The problem is that it reads like a fact, because it doesn’t show how it connects to her overall discussion. While the sentence describes events that happened (women won seats), it doesn’t feel linked to the ideas introduced earlier in her paper.
Her fix is to add a phrase from her thesis statement into the sentence:
| CONNECTED | Another reason the 19th Amendment was a crucial step forward for women’s rights is that it allowed women to win seats in state legislatures across the country throughout the 1920s. |
Now the paragraph is clearly connected to her argument instead of sitting there on its own.
Where and how a topic sentence connects depends on which type of body paragraph you’re writing, and that gets its own full treatment here: Topic Sentences: Varsity Level.
Common Topic Sentence Mistakes
Four mistakes account for most of the weak topic sentences I see, and all four are easy to fix once you can spot them.
Each mistake shows a different way of fumbling the topic sentence for the same paragraph. For the examples below, refer to the following information:
- Topic: women’s suffrage in the United States
- Thesis Statement: The 19th Amendment was a crucial step forward for women’s rights.
- Main Point: The amendment gave women direct political influence for the first time.
Mistake 1: Announcing
Problem: The sentence announces what the paragraph will discuss instead of just discussing it. These usually open with “In this paragraph I will” or “This section will examine,” and every one of those words is a word you spent without telling the reader anything. It also puts distance between the reader and your actual point, which makes your writing feel tentative.
| WEAK | In this paragraph, I will discuss how the 19th Amendment affected women’s political participation. |
| FIXED | The 19th Amendment dramatically increased women’s political participation by giving them access to electoral influence. |
Why the fix works: Announcing places the writer as an element in the topic sentence, which can pull focus from the main point in the paragraph. The fixed version drops the announcement and focuses on the content of the topic sentence instead.
Mistake 2: Ambiguous or Missing Focus
Problem: The sentence is broad enough to sit at the top of almost any paragraph, which means it fails to identify a main focus. Your reader can’t tell what’s coming, so they can’t tell whether the paragraph delivered it. This one is common in first drafts, when you have a rough idea what the paragraph is about but haven’t nailed it down yet.
| WEAK | Women faced many challenges throughout American history. |
| FIXED | Before 1920, women had no direct way to influence the laws that governed them. |
Why the fix works: The fixed version pins down a time period (before 1920) and names one specific challenge (no way to influence the law) instead of gesturing at many challenges across all of American history.
Mistake 3: Question Format
Problem: A question invites several possible answers rather than committing to one answer, so it can’t establish a main point. It also quietly shifts the work onto your reader, who now has to guess which answer your paragraph is going to argue for. Save questions as a possible method for your hook, where speculation can grab the reader’s attention.
| WEAK | How did the 19th Amendment change women’s lives? |
| FIXED | The 19th Amendment transformed women’s lives by providing them with direct political influence for the first time. |
Why the fix works: The fixed version answers the question instead of asking it, which commits the paragraph to one position the reader can follow and evaluate.
Mistake 4: List Format
Problem: The sentence lists everything the paragraph will cover instead of naming one unified focus. A list is not a focus. Naming three things tells your reader what territory the paragraph covers, but does not identify one key focal point.
| WEAK | This paragraph will cover the 19th Amendment’s passage, its immediate effects, and its long-term impact. |
| FIXED | The 19th Amendment’s passage marked the beginning of women’s systematic integration into American political life. |
Why the fix works: The fixed version replaces three separate subjects with the single idea that ties them together, so the paragraph has one focus and the listed items become supporting detail.
You can still cover the items you originally listed. Work them into the body of the paragraph, where they belong, and let the topic sentence carry the focus.
Next Steps
Every body paragraph you write needs a topic sentence, so the next question is what each one connects to. That depends on the type of paragraph, and it’s covered on the Topic Sentences: Varsity Level page.
From there, work through the three body paragraph types: Background Paragraphs, Argumentative Paragraphs, and Example Paragraphs.