Such a method seems to be readily applicable to a scientific experiment, where there is usually a set order for doing things, but is it going to have any relevance for an essay on, say, the life of Florence Nightingale? We think it is again a good idea to think in terms of ‘a rule of three’. The temptation in writing about someone’s life in a history essay might be just to produce an endless list on the lines of ‘she did this, then she did this, and then she did this’. But if we divide the core of the essay into three stages we start to... Read more...
Posts Tagged ‘topic sentence’
There are only a few questions that you need to ask yourself. Have I written a sentence? Do I need a compound sentence? Do I need subordinate clauses? Have I produced all these elements in accordance with the rules? Does my sentence make sense and read well? Beyond the individual sentence, however, is the logic of a paragraph, where we need to be more Ware of how each sentence as a unit combines in a larger pattern. The ore we are in control of building an argument, the more we are going to be control of the argument in an essay. This might be more apparent if we look again at the paragraph we have been discussing as the student initially wrote it and then at the revised version:
The creation of the city of Philadelphia, and the colony of Pennsylvania at the same time, by William Penn, is often referred to as his ‘Holy Experiment’. He wanted to create a place where anyone could live, I without fear. It was the first place of its... Read more...
Far too many students have very little idea quite where they are heading in any paragraph of an essay, but the fact is that every paragraph can and should be tightly, and even self-consciously, organized. Just as an essay as a whole sets up an issue, deviances, and arrives somewhere, so each paragraph of an essay needs to locate itself, advance, and arrive somewhere new.
If you look back at the opening paragraph of a Thackeray essay in the last section you should be able to see that it conforms to this pattern. It actually consists of three sentences which fulfill these three functions. In a rather similar way, this opening paragraph of an essay on Mary Kinsley, a Victorian traveler and writer, and the problem of ‘place’ starts with a ‘topic’ sentence that locates the issue, then advances by elaborating on that, finally arriving somewhere new. We have marked (/) the three steps of the paragraph:
The life and works of Mary Kingsley illustrate the different relationship men and women often experience towards ‘place’. / For men, the image of home is likely to suggest security, confidenc... Read more...
It is useful to think of the first sentence of a paragraph as the ‘topic’ sentence. In our revised version of the letter, the topic sentence is: David was not able to attend school yesterday. It is effective as an opening because it is such a controlled, almost declamatory, statement. Most essays can start in a similar way: you can create an initial dramatic and arresting effect by having a simple sentence that stands alone, not tangled up in subordinate clauses and details. Look, for example, at these opening sentences from students’ essays:
Modern poetry is disturbing and problematic.
Modem poetry, by which we mean poetry produced roughly between 1910 and 1930, falls into various categories, of which the most original is probably that referred to as ‘modernist’, in particular T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.
There is nothing actually wrong with the second example here, but it does not create any great expectation that we are going to encounter an interesting essay. Rather, it is going to be an essay loaded with facts, crowded in at every comma. The first example, by contra... Read more...