Ask Josh or Caitlin or other beginning writers what their paragraphs
are about and you'll get an answer like "dogs" or "raising
dogs" or "therapy dogs."
Students are used to thinking of words and phrases as topics.
They don't understand that a topic is not a complete idea.
Since they don't catch that concept, students have trouble writing
paragraphs that are all about one idea. Until students understand
that ideas only become whole when they are in a sentence format,
they cannot grasp the concept of unity in writing.
Many people write competently without knowing the term topic
sentence, but you will be hard pressed to teach students to
write unified papers without using the term as you teach them
about paragraph planning and construction.
What is a topic sentence?
A topic sentence is a generalization that summarizes
the main idea of a body paragraph. Grammatically, such
a sentence contains a topic and an assertion
about that topic, just as a thesis statement does.
In other words, it is not sensible to say a paragraph is about
dogs. Dogs is a topic. You need to add an assertion about
the topic—a predicate—in order to have a complete thought.
You cannot have a main idea that isn't a complete sentence.
The main idea sums up the significance of all the evidence
in a paragraph. The sentence itself is not evidence. Evidence
has to come from an identifiable source; a summary is a generalization
of what the sources say.
In the five-paragraph
essay format usually used for teaching writing to beginning
writers, the topic sentences are reasons for believing the thesis
is true.
Creating topic sentences in skeleton
The relationship between an essay's thesis statement and its
body paragraphs is readily seen in the writing
skeleton™.
In a writing skeleton, writers set out the working thesis for
their essays. Then they use the thesis + reason formula
to create sentences that sum up what they expect the evidence
to prove.
The simple thesis + reason formula ties the main idea of a
body paragraph to the thesis statement by forcing the two
sentences to merge into one complex sentence. The working
thesis is the independent clause; the reason in the dependent
clause is the main idea of the body paragraph.
Please remember that the writing skeleton™ is a
planning device. Its function is to keep the writer from forgetting
what the whole essay is about.
Beginning writers who work from topic outlines or mind maps often
lose sight of their thesis before they get past their second paragraph.
The writing skeleton™ prevents writers from forgetting what
their essays are to be about.
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Teaching topic sentences
Help students grasp what is meant by the main idea of a paragraph
by employing two perspectives more or less concurrently: a writing
perspective and a reading comprehension perspective.
1. Teach students to use writing skeletons™ .
When they expand those skeletons into comprehensive plans via
an outline template
or other device, students will see how the central idea (a generalization)
is logically backed up with specific evidence.
2. Teach students to pick out topic sentences when they read.
From their writing experience, students will know that the simplest
way of developing an expository
paragraph is by putting the generalization first and then
giving specific evidence for it.
When students read, they will see writers don't restate their
thesis in each body paragraph. Writers have more subtle ways of
keeping focus on their thesis that are more appropriate in finished
essays than the formulaic process of the writing skeleton™.
Skip some paragraphs when teaching
When you discuss paragraph development, focus on body paragraphs.
Ignore
Beginning and ending paragraphs are organized on a different
pattern than body paragraphs; the difference will just confuse
beginners. And beginners writers won't write works long enough
to need transition paragraphs.
Eliminating awkwardness
An essay sounds very awkward if writers simply copy their working
skeleton into their essays when they compose their first drafts.
Let students use the awkward constructions from the writing skeleton™
in a few essays if it keeps them from getting lost. Awkwardness
is preferable to an essay in which the central ideas of the body
paragraphs are disconnected from its thesis statement.
I've never had a student who hung on to the writing skeleton™
wording for more than one or two essays. Once they get some confidence,
they move to more natural ways of writing.
